Four of us, including two pilots, went to see Dunkirk last night. Since the historical story is well-known I won’t worry too much about spoilers.
Massive navy ships sink almost immediately after being hit by small bombs or torpedoes. Airplanes without engines, on the other hand, have near-infinite glide capability.
The movie is good at portraying the simple and non-redundant nature of the planes of the day, e.g., the Spitfire. But when a pilot is about to ditch in the English Channel, why doesn’t he take advantage of the near-infinite glide time to pull back the canopy and facilitate egress? There is also a pilot who has such great control of his aircraft that, after running out of fuel and thereby losing the engine, he can shoot down a German plane. After this heroic deed, however, he is unable to make a few turns such that he can land on the beach near the still-evacuating British and French soldiers. Instead he lands on a German-held beach (except that you wouldn’t know that the beach is held by “Germans” per se from watching the movie; the opposing forces are always “the enemy” and never “the Germans” or “the Nazis”).
The movie is about the individual experience of being in the midst of Dunkirk. There are no maps and there is no context provided. Nor is there the rolling text wrap-up at the end of the movie telling you what happened in real life. One friend complained that she was “confused” during the movie, but maybe that is the point. Being in the midst of a war is confusing, according to every first-person account that I’ve ever read.
Readers: what did you think?
[Separately, one member of our group had recently seen Valerian and pronounced it “the worst movie ever made,” based on the plot and acting. Who has seen Valerian and wants to comment?]
Saw it in 3D last night. It’s worth seeing based being the state of the art for special effects. All the aliens looked weird yet convincing. Most scenes in the movie had aliens in them.
Plot was difficult to follow. I had trouble liking the good guys or hating the bad guys. The hero and heroine were secret agents and looked like they belonged in Fast Times at Ridgemont high. Clive Owens was the villain, but it was hard to hate him because you didn’t realize he was a bad guy for most of the movie.
I am watching Game of Thrones these days and the screenwriters make sure you have strong feelings about all the characters. Makes you keep watching as you’re sad when good guys get killed, happy when bad guys get killed and worried all the time about who’s gonna get killed next.
There are three parts to Valerian (and Lauraline): the setup, which is excellent; the mystery, which takes most of the movie to resolve and requires meandering through the entire station to get there; and the end game, which happens pretty quickly.
If I saw the film again I’d probably notice the bad acting everyone else says is rampant, but I was too dazzled by the visuals.
The problem I had with the resolution is that it is another military mistakes thing which insults the good work done by the first part of the movie. I’d have liked to see a more sensible and worthwhile reason for things to go wrong in a major way, one that hasn’t already been done to death by scads of other movies.
I’ve heard that some critics don’t like it because it’s all white men. Not enough diversity. Couldn’t they have found some Caribbean blacks or women to be the stars like those black lady mathematicians who had a pivotal role in the space program. Even in Star Wars nowadays the heroes are black or female. Maybe they didn’t want to mention Germans to avoid alienating the German market.
It appears that Dunkirk was made mainly for a British audience. That audience is already familiar with the history of how the British and French were driven back to the coast and evacuated, so it wasn’t necessary to explain it. The point of the film was apparently to give a visceral feel of the experience of the British servicemen.
I’ve heard that some critics don’t like it because it’s all white men.
A quick Google search indicates that it’s one critic in USA Today. In the midst of a positively glowing review he states that “the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way”. As a result of this one guy’s ignorance of history, vast numbers of right wingers on the Internet erupted in fury. It’s much ado about nothing.
“Airplanes without engines, on the other hand, have near-infinite glide capability.”
That bothered me, too. But later I recalled that the movie was self-announced to have three parts, albeit interweaved: land, sea, and air. The first two were said to be a week and a day long, respectively, but the aviation part only an hour.
Those who recall Nolan’s “Memento” know how he likes to play with time.
Vince:
> In the midst of a positively glowing review he states that “the fact that there are
>only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong
>way”. As a result of this one guy’s ignorance of history, vast numbers of right
>wingers on the Internet erupted in fury. It’s much ado about nothing.
Another way to look at this could be to state the problem is related to the continual allowance of many in academia for these sorts of commentary to pass as deep though on almost any subject.
There were black men, two French colonial soldiers trying in vain to board. Many of them fought valiantly, including to protect the evacuation. The Germans would take them prisoner, then mow them down with machine guns.
There were many Indians at Dunkirk, and from historical records they kept their cool better than their British colleagues. It would have been nice to show them.
The movie is all about the experience, and chaos and confusion are a big part. It also inverts war-movie tropes: it’s civilians who show bravery and rescue the soldiers.
Never having done a deadstick landing, I wonder if it just feels like an eternity?
“Valerian” is not nearly as bad as Disney’s 1979 movie “The Black Hole,” also known as “the movie with the most apt title ever!”
Until someone gives Valerian a “Phantom Edit” type of treament, probably the best way to enjoy Valerian is to leave the theater about halfway through the film. You will have seen most of the good stuff and you will miss a ton of annoying idiocy.
My daughter diagnosed the problem with Valerian as giving Luc Besson much too large a budget. Certainly the film would be much better if trimmed by an hour.
Valerian is too long and makes little sense overall. It’s like a string of random though individually beautiful beads, fading badly toward the end. One scene/sequence after another is visually-wonderful and hints at an interesting universe, but the weak and meandering plot fails to connect those into an interesting narrative.
Another problem, a severe one, is that the main characters are extremely annoying. If you can, watch the film with the dialog track suppressed!
Over and over clever and visually-appealing SF ideas and gadgets are introduced but then forgotten or traduced within moments. Most examples I could offer would be spoilers, but one that isn’t (because it is so very cliched) is when the two heroes–who are both soldiers and military teammates–put on super suits, the boy closes his helmet and starts punching and flying through walls, and the girl is then captured by some slow-moving aliens waving swords. She’s wearing her super suit but never uses it to kick alien ass! The film is loaded with this sort of solecism– universal translators used briefly, then neglected– though still hanging on the character’s belt– when most wanted, etc, etc.
The “visible-minority high-commander barking orders through a videoconference link” is reprised here from Besson’s (much better) film “The Fifth Element.”
The film is loaded with homages to SF films and TV shows. One little affectation which may annoy anyone with a 3-digit IQ is that the heroes end up in a little spacecraft that looks like an Apollo CSM from the 1960’s– but we see them looking out through windows in the SM, which seems to be large cylindrical cabin. If that is so, it is not clear why it should have a huge rocket-engine bell projecting from its ass.
Finally, Valerian features a comprehensively implausible and unaffecting romance between characters who have too many other, incompatible relationships. The two heroes are supposed to be at once cute-bickering but inseparable lovers, a team of soldiers with greatly disparate ranks (Major, Sergeant), super-spy undercover agents, mechanical geniuses, amazing kung-fu fighters, and so-on and so-forth, but what the plot and dialogue really convey is that they are blithering idiots whom you would never want to meet.
Valerian: Visually, it’s amazing, of course, but for sci-fi it’s very much like Star Wars in it’s approach to science and technology. It’s basically like a James Bond-ish (spy kids as horny twentysomethings) fantasy fulfillment gig. Basically, a gifted but irresponsible “lovable” rogue type guy has a supermodel sidekick through a space detective adventure. Like Star Wars, instead of spending a lot of effort imagining how it would be to live in a universe with FTL travel and aliens, the science exists mainly as cool versions of things that existed in the 20th century on earth. They basically live in a space re-creation of the (colonial) francophone world, with a space Polynesia, a space North African bazaar, and a giant, floating, multicultural space Paris. As the previous poster indicated, most of the technology pops into being in order to move some plot point along, and then is quickly discarded. (There are a few cool exceptions) To an American adult, the romantic themes are cliched and ridiculous.
The female lead is so attractive that I don’t think I can really say whether or not her acting was bad, but the male lead looked a little bit like Benecio del Toro and his acting reminds me of Keanu Reeves. The two of them were not convincing, but again, this is fantasy-fulfillment stuff.
That said, the visuals were stunning, space Paris has a pretty great red light district with a space Moulin Rouge with great entertainment, and the 9-14 year olds that this movie is aimed at will no doubt love the rest of it. (Let’s be honest, a lot of us love Star Wars mainly because of how old we were when we first saw it)
Dunkirk (IMAX) was visually impressive but I found it fell short of two prior movies the critics said were comparable. It did not have the broad sweep of The Longest Day or the emotional connections of Saving Private Ryan. The technical portrayal was similar to Private Ryan, but there was no evidence of 400,000 stranded troops; the most in any scene was a few hundred.
A niggle from comments on another site: the script assumed the audience knew the Mole was a mooring jetty at the beach. One commenter said she kept waiting for the revealing of the enemy spy. One of philg’s Facebook friends?
Not from the movie, but I was surprised when I learned earlier from a book that the
1940 Spitfire carried only 75 gallons of fuel. Truly a point defense day fighter. So the likelihood of running dry on an extended sortie was very real.
No Oscars here, except maybe technicals.
Prior, to Dunkirk, the last WWII-era movie I’ve seen was Patton. Dunkirk was a kind of anti-Patton, opposite in scope, focus, and just about everything else.
(I enjoyed Dunkirk a lot, but not long ago I read Connie Willis’ books Blackout and All Clear. Enthusiastic 21st century Oxford time traveling history students go back to observe the British home front in WWII and things go awry; one gets stuck on a small boat headed for Dunkirk. So maybe I had enough back story to know what I was seeing.)
I enjoyed the inflight Spitfire flying sequences – had to suspend my disbelief at the 1000:1 glide ratio at the end, but the turns and maneuvers for the majority of the dogfighting wasn’t…uh….Pearl Harbor-ish in its unrealism. I thought that it really gave a sense of how the pilots were yanking and banking all over trying to gain an advantage. All in all, I enjoyed the movie. Probably won’t add to my home collection – I like more of a story for re-watching again and again, like Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan or Patton.
I finally saw Valerian today. I almost skipped it given the comments, but I found it to be definitely “okay.” Certainly not the worst movie ever. I think the problem with Science Fiction now days is that every movie is judged by Star Wars or Star Trek criteria. So if it’s not part of that franchise, then it’s not good enough. Tellingly, the number of showings at my local theater was drastically reduced between last week and this week. Attendance was really sparse in the showing I attended, so the movie really isn’t doing well in the U.S.
I felt that the approach to Dunkirk was different and I do appreciate the directors approach at telling the story. I didn’t feel it was a bad approach. Having said that I’d definitely think a remake could be successful as well. And yes, the long gliding scene was a bit ridiculous.