Dunkirk 2017

Dunkirk lost me at hello.

Few are as historically illiterate as the scriptwriters: contrary to the written description setting up what the movie is about…the ‘enemy’ didn’t trap hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers on the beaches of Dunkirk. The ‘enemy’? Some sort of evil that can’t be named? Orcs? Space invaders? Amish hordes?

No, it was the German Army. Or the Nazis. Or the Wehrmacht. Or Jerries.

Dunkirk happened, it was a real event, the culmination of a disastrous series of military miscalculations that allowed the German Army to bypass the Maginot Line, sweep through The Netherlands and Belgium in days, and defeat the Belgian and French Armies and the British Expeditionary Force in six weeks. The evacuation of the BEF and a hundred thousand defeated French soldiers occurred due to one of the Second World War’s most inexplicable decisions: Hitler stopped his Panzers (i.e. ‘the enemy’) just outside of Dunkirk, allowing a heroic effort by the Royal Navy and a fleet of civilian boats to evacuate almost 400,000 troops to fight and win another day.

The opening of Dunkirk is but the first of a discouraging and disconcerting series of modernisms which infects and diminishes the entire movie. It causes the interesting music track, the CGI mastery making air combat scenes between the RAF and the Luftwaffe (ah, that unnamed ‘enemy’ again) as real as if filmed with 1940’s style Go Pros, and the vast 70mm canvas of beach and thousands of troops waiting for rescue to be a sideshow to postmodern angst, and the triumph of Oprah and Dr. Phil navel gazing to supplant the real heroism, the valor, the stalwart brave men who stood and took it on that beach, and escaped to win the war four and half years later.

The movie juggles several stories with varying success to tell the tale of the Dunkirk evacuation. The troops on the beach, the Navy’s ongoing attempts to organize a massive evacuation under fire, and a focus on one of the little boats as it bravely heeds the call for help.

The acting is beside the point, although it is more than tiresome to be subjected to staged tableaus of jut jawed stoicism by upper class officers striking heroic poses as if in a Monty Python skit or outtakes from The Longest Day from fifty years ago.

The special effects action sequences make the movie special, or as special such a sad inglorious script can express. To anyone familiar with the actual events of Dunkirk the movie jars throughout. Churchill is basically a non-person. Churchill’s heroic words spoken after Dunkirk, rallying his nation and the world, his ‘we will fight on the beaches and in the towns’ speech, are spoken off handedly at the end, by a soldier in a voice that might have been reciting the ingredients on a catsup bottle, and who mumbles and stares at the camera in a close up with an expression of, well, dismal disillusionment.

This after a successful evacuation of 400,000 fighting men, this after the scriptwriters and the Director, knowing how it all turned out: complete victory, the utter destruction of a grotesquely evil ideology which murdered millions and caused death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, the triumph of democracy over Fascism...no, in their 2017 world, the soldiers are but victims, the hero is a shirker, the survivor is allowed to murder a young boy sailing on one of the small boats, the enemy is unnamed and faceless, and Kenneth Branagh strikes a heroic pose and vows to go down with his pier.

After it was over, I wondered why the Director and scriptwriters didn’t go all the way and describe the Nazis as ‘militants’ and the evacuation as an example of Churchills imperial ambitions thwarted.

Unlike the decisions made by Steven Spielberg, reflecting on his father’s experiences as a soldier in WWII, showing true bravery, heroism, selflessness, camaraderie, and victory…Dunkirk dwells on uncertainty, selfishness, unheroic behavior, cowardice, command idiocy, and stages its final action sequence with a decided, ridiculous, Camus-ian existential ending: aujudhui maman est morte I suppose, and I decided to land my Spitfire on a militant controlled beach to satisfy the Director’s quest to turn actual history into a dialectic.

I did have some sympathy for the movie makers in that it seems, even with incredible special effect capabilities, impossible to match shots in the same moment with the what the ocean decides to do on an hour to hour basis. Thus, long shots of columns of troops awaiting rescue on a sunny day with small surf becomes, in a close up, a grey day with a hard onshore wind, which becomes in a medium shot in the same sequence, a partly cloudy afternoon with a glassy sea. Even stranger is how the parallel stories seem to parallel in time for a while, and then descend into some sort of editing hell as night becomes day and vice versa, morning becomes late afternoon, and two heroic RAF pilots pilot Spitfires that become the equivalent of six-shooters is old westerns: they fly for hours and hours, and never run out of ammunition.

Ever.

But, Dunkirk is not an awful movie, or not worth watching. If anything, it proves that with today’s special effects capabilities, movies about WWII, as was proven twenty years ago with Saving Private Ryan, can create unsettling quality war realism. Seeing Dunkirk proves that It would be possible to recreate the Battle of Midway, or the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, or the air war above Hanoi. It would be possible to recreate Waterloo, Gettysburg, or the Little Big Horn.

What Dunkirk also proves is that the key to making a great movie about great world changing historic events is writing a great script equal to the event. Churchill’s absence speaks volumes about the makers. The dead postmodern reading of a heroic speech that is seen as a key turning point in a war against Hitler’s evil savagery is a sacrilege, doing a disservice to the men and women who fought in WWII.

As with the recent American WWII movie Fury, the makers of Dunkirk must have calculated that they could film British soldiers as victims, or cowards hiding in a ship, or murderers plotting to kill a helpless French soldier, or having a rescued soldier kill a teenager, being victims not heroes, not brave soldiers and sailors and pilots and civilians united with common purpose to defeat Nazi Germany, not men of valor, not a band of brothers…with relative impunity. They, no doubt calculated that actual veterans of Dunkirk are dead, or in their nineties, and the chances of one of them kicking the scheisse out of them for such a monumental and insulting rewriting of history, of heroism, are slight.

But, if nonagenarian veteran of Dunkirk does take a swing at C. Nolan, no jury in Great (not mediocre, Chris) Britain would convict.