WWTBAM Bored

From Entertainment Weekly's oscar special

On Dunkirk:

>>>"Dunkirk is a war movie without the comforts of context. There's no map room or a true-life character who has to survive. The characters and audience are on equal footing, clueless......"<<<

I fully agree that the audience was held clueless, but FFS, the men at Dunkirk were not clueless and they had context. They had just been chased across France/Belgium by the Germans for a couple of weeks (or however long it was).

Obviously, EW writer wanted "previous war-movie" context.

Either here or on facebook someone reported on a kid whe exclaimed, after the false-alarm about incoming missiles to Hawaii "why would anyone want to attack Hawaii!!".


There are a lot of people without context out there. At *best*, they just think historical info must be from some video game they haven't played yet.

I fully recognize that Nolan made a movie that is perfectly attuned to modern sensibilities. However, my dead horse is that he did not put us on the beach with the soldiers, but rather that he made the soldiers "us", so to speak.

They are just "clueless" flotsam and jetsom who just happened to reach a specific point on the beach at Dunkirk.

The way the movie is, they had as much chance of reaching Marseille as they did the beach at Dunkirk.

1)Within the British forces, there would have been a large number of sergeants (and officers) who were WW1 veterans. This wasn't their first rodeo.

2) Just to give the "Clueless" flotam and jetsom on a random beach their due, they inflicted significant casualties on the Germans in the course of the short campaign. The Germans lost anywhere from 27,000 to 45,000 dead-100,000 plus wounded in the invasion of France.

Spock wrote:I fully recognize that Nolan made a movie that is perfectly attuned to modern sensibilities. However, my dead horse is that he did not put us on the beach with the soldiers, but rather that he made the soldiers "us", so to speak.

They are just "clueless" flotsam and jetsom who just happened to reach a specific point on the beach at Dunkirk.

The way the movie is, they had as much chance of reaching Marseille as they did the beach at Dunkirk.

1)Within the British forces, there would have been a large number of sergeants (and officers) who were WW1 veterans. This wasn't their first rodeo.

2) Just to give the "Clueless" flotsam and jetsom on a random beach their due, they inflicted significant casualties on the Germans in the course of the short campaign. The Germans lost anywhere from 27,000 to 45,000 dead-100,000 plus wounded in the invasion of France.

The official numbers of German casualties during the six weeks Battle of France:
27,074 dead
111,034 wounded
18,384 missing
1,129 aircrew killed
1,236 aircraft lost
795–822 tanks destroyed
157,621 total casualties

I didn't see the EW special, so I only have the one line you chose to quote for context.

Spock wrote:On Dunkirk:

>>>"Dunkirk is a war movie without the comforts of context. There's no map room or a true-life character who has to survive. The characters and audience are on equal footing, clueless......"<<<

I don't think they were implying what you're upset about, Spock. Look in particular at the sentence I underlined.

"No map room": certainly, the soldiers of the BEF were veterans who knew their business. EW wasn't denying that. But it's often true that enlisted men don't have a clear picture of the overall strategic picture, particularly after a hasty retreat like the one these men had just been forced on. And they certainly didn't know the decisions that were being made in London that would ultimately result in their rescue. Those WWI veteran sergeants you mention, standing on the beach at Dunkirk waiting for a boat, would simply know that they were in deep, deep trouble. (Now, as far as the audience is concerned, it's already been discussed in previous Dunkirk threads how the admiral coordinating the evacuation on the beach played that role.)

No "true-life character": If the movie is "Patton", the audience (those with a reasonable amount of historical knowledge, anyway) knows that Patton survives the war, and is on the winning side, to boot. The same would be true if the main protagonists in this movie had been identified as real-life individuals who had been well-known to have survived the battle. Since they were, AFAIK, fictitious characters, it was entirely possible that the characters might have died in the movie. We don't know if they'll survive, any more that they do. And that's what EW was saying.

Now, since we do know that the evacuation was a success, we're not really on the same footing as the characters. Any one of the protagonists might have become casualties in the movie, but it would have been a really disappointing depiction of the event if all three of them had. So you can pick that nit with EW, if you're still in the mood.

MarleysGh0st wrote:No "true-life character": If the movie is "Patton", the audience (those with a reasonable amount of historical knowledge, anyway) knows that Patton survives the war, and is on the winning side, to boot.

MarleysGh0st wrote:Now, since we do know that the evacuation was a success, ...

Spoiler Alert, PLEASE!!!11

Ran across a fun little blurb in a George MacDonald Fraser "Private McAuslin" short story. After the war, he was an officer in the Gordon Highlanders. The majority of that unit in an earlier iteration did NOT make it out at Dunkirk. They went into the bag (ie were captured) at St. Valery.

Poor "clueless" beings with no context.

<<<<<"We came in quietly on the chorus.........which Scottish soldiers invariably sing after the first two or three drinks, and which the remnants of the regiment sang as they waited for the end at St. Valery."

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Point taken to everything Marley said. However given the historical illiteracy of modern times, we need to see why and how they got to that beach. Otherwise, it is just random nihilism and confusion as the Klingons try to take the Orb of Power from our heroes to take out the Transformers and Superman.

Within minutes of the beginning of the film, I remember thinking-"Ok, I guess this is a science fiction/superhero movie" and that is how I viewed it from that point on.

Admittedly, in some ways, my views were probably colored in that I had recently watched "Edge of Tomorrow"-Tom Cruise Sci-Fi movie with an invasion of France and so forth.

It is already set. Myself and Victor Davis Hanson (who has roughly the same views on Dunkirk as I do) are going to have an Oscar watching party with our like-minded compatriots in a phone booth and throw bricks at the TV (LOL).

I have mentioned this before, but Alt-history fans may like a series I just read 1)Afrika Reich and 2) The Madagaskar Plan. They are set in an Africa where the Germans are victorious after they captured the BEF at Dunkirk thus forcing Churchill to resign in favor of Lord Halifax.

Shades of the 2 recent movies -"Dunkirk" and "Darkest Hour." I have to see Darkest yet.

Spock wrote:Point taken to everything Marley said. However

...

You're just going to go back to imagining things that were not remotely hinted at in the movie, in order to rant at it for those imaginary failings.

In other words, point not taken.