Saw Dunkirk on Thursday. I’d rate it a 2/5, maybe a 3/5. It was tense, mostly because of the musical score, I’d say. More detail of my opinion follows in yellow below.
The aerials were great, the individual plane combat scenes, the flyovers. But, character development was very sparse, as was story line and dialogue. There was an unbelievable scene at the end with a plane managing to maneuver when it should have just dropped out of the sky. So many of the characters seemed the same and I had trouble discerning who was who and also had trouble understanding the little dialogue there was early on. Bottom line, I did not really care about any of the characters because none of them were developed enough and I didn’t know enough about them to care with possibly one exception, though even that character development was very limited (pilot, face covered almost the entire movie). Also, there were not enough planes, ships, men (supposed to be 300,000, right?) on screen, so story accuracy was questionable. I really don’t know much more about what happened at Dunkirk after seeing this movie, so that is problematic. Some of the noise (music?) was very jarring as well, perhaps by design to make us feel a part of the action and chaos, tension and danger, and the time jumps and different viewpoints of the same scene took a bit to process to realize what was happening. Perhaps I am being too critical, but I was disappointed in the movie. Saving Private Ryan, though much more graphic and bloody, is a vastly superior film in my opinion. Hacksaw Ridge is better too in my opinion, as are many others. This one was just okay in my opinion. Not bad, but not good either, though it was visually great to view in some scenes.
