Hello Léo, how are you doing? You haven’t answered me about your coming trip, tell me, you make me curious. I’m thinking that we are so cool you know, you write your review on the plane, I do mine on the train to Germany at 9PM. People will think that we are serious students or young entrepreneurs haha!
Today I’m going to change my topic into a whole new area, it is about the darkest time in the modern history of mankind: World War 2, my favorite topic.
DUNKIRK (2017)
“Dunkirk” is directed by Christopher Nolan. Nolan’s talent has nothing to argue with. He is absolutely one of the best director that Hollywood has at the moment. “Memento”, “Dark Knight” trilogy, “Interstella”, those are best examples about Christopher Nolan’s works. Besides, the soundtrack in the movie is written by Hans Zimmer, a master of film score composer and record producer. What would happen when two masters work together, a masterpiece! A unique masterpiece! Interstella is an example, now we have “Dunkirk”.
“Dunkirk” starts peacefully and bizarrely with the scene of a group of soldiers walking on the empty street in a French town, scraps of paper flutter down from the sky: “WE SURROUND YOU. SURRENDER + SURVIVE.”
This is the last moment that your heart and your brain feel safe, calm in this movie. It’s the calm before the storm. What happens next is epic.
Gunfire starts firing at the troops, they start running for their lives. One slender kid named Tommy made it to the beach and see an even stranger scene. Tens of thousands English and French soldiers are lining up at the sea’s edge, expose themselves on the open ground. They are waiting for rescue from oversea, the help that deep down in their mind they know it will never come in time, they leave their lives into the hand of fate. Four hundred thousand British, French troops stuck in the beach of Dunkirk make it the “colossal military disaster”, Winston Churchill said. The German army don’t even march to the beach with their ground forces because “Why waste precious tanks when they can pick us off from the air like fish in a barrel?”. Only 7,669 men were evacuated on the first day 27th May 1940.
Then a miracle happened, the Operation Dynamo. In the next eight days, more than three hundred thousand men made it to England. Today we call the Dunkirk event is “the miracle of Dunkirk”. Read & watch more about Operation Dynamo here.
http://www.worldwar2heritage.com/en/timeline-details/10/Operation-Dynamo and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KouNlpVEeQU
In “Dunkirk” we will see this event through the soldier and civilian perspective. 1 event, 3 narrative strands, 3 different timelines: “1. The Mole”, “2. The Sea” and “3. The Air”. They will end up at one moment where the civilian ships reach Dunkirk beach bringing hope for the soldiers. Together, the narratives describe the fierce, the brutal of what happened at Dunkirk. The way Christopher Nolan directed the movie enhances the feeling for the audience. There are almost no storylines for the characters, we don’t who they are or where are they come from, very few lines for the characters and the music is intense for most of the time of the movie. We as the audience can’t do anything but push yourself hard into the chair, breathless, mouth opened, let the fear of the characters becomes yours and witness the terror of war.
“Dunkirk” is more like a survivor movie than a war movie but that’s why it exposes faithfully what happened, in the mind of the soldiers at Dunkirk that moment there is only one word which is “SURVIVE”. A masterpiece that bring out the ugliest, the worst of war also the courage, the “spirit of Dunkirk”. If you haven’t watched this movie in the theater, I deeply feel sorry for you. “Dunkirk” will enter my list of movies that should be watched again at theater, especially in IMAX format.
“DUNKIRK” – Masterful visual storytelling on an epic scale.
Thank you for reading.
-MiloufromSaigon-
Bonus photo:
British and other Allied troops waiting to be evacuated from the beach at Dunkirk, France, 1940. © Photos.com/Thinkstock
Bonus quotes:
Blind Man: Well done lads. Well done.
Alex: All we did is survive.
Blind Man: That’s enough.