First time I've been to the cinema since last October. This one was worth a trip; the sort of film that's better on the big screen. The most impressive big vistas were the beach, with loads and loads of soldiers on them.
It's a fairly short war epic, and it's not over the top with drama. There were only two staged moments, one where a pilot runs out of fuel (which you can spot a mile off as there are numerous warnings in advance about keeping an eye on the fuel level) and one where an eager boy on a civilian vessel gets accidentally hit by a shell-shocked Cilian Murphy. Apart from this silliness, it felt like a fairly honest slice of history, with the drama building up slowly throughout.
There's very little dialogue, and a fairly sparse pulsing soundtrack. The plot explanation is minimal (I struggled as I didn't know what a mole was), and like all war films it's hard to tell who's who.
It takes place on land, air and sea. On land the British soldiers stand around doing nothing, while the French heod the line. In the air the RAF pilots are suitably calm and chipper, "Afternoon!"" says one cheerfully after being rescued from near-death. At sea it's no fun at all, as every rescue leads you to another boat which is shortly sunk.
This being a historical film I was expecting lots of writing on the screen at the end about what happened, but instead I had to read all the Wikipedia pages. The main historical point seems to be that the Germans missed a trick in not finishing off the British when they had the chance. It's believed Hitler thought that once the British returned home they wouldn't come back to mainland Europe. The film could also do more to show that Dunkirk was in fact a stonking German victory (which is how it was described in Nazi Germany), as the British had to leave so much behind, for example 20,000 motorcycles.
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