User Reviews

I have never bothered to post a review before for any film. But I feel that I must to point out the nonsense of film reviewers these days. I see the critics post as must see, film of the year, et, etc. This was billed as a film with fantastic sound. I found the continuous droning noise whose pitch increased during the film to what I hoped would be a fantastic climax, but I the drone included what sounded like whale noises and more boring droning noises with occasional sounds of gun fire. I was bored after 15 minutes, the ridiculous story of the kid in the fishing boat, the original bit about the spitfire pilots and the nonsense of the soldiers taking cover in the boat.....absolute shallow lazy boring rubbish filming. If they added a decent music score it may have kept me interested. This film does not show it as it was its just absolute cap and does not come across as a powerful film at all. A waste of money.

Ever since the end of the second world war, the phrase 'Dunkirk spirit' has been used in Britain to describe courage and solidarity in times of adversity. However, this film chooses to focus on a young soldier who tries every underhand trick he can think of to get on board the rescue vessels ahead of everyone else. Where's the bravery or self sacrifice in that? Instead of identifying with this "hero" I became increasingly angry with him and had nothing but contempt for his actions. Why not push in front of everyone else by pretending to be a medic? Why not pretend to be a survivor from a ship that's just been bombed and sunk? Not only do you get priority access to the next rescue boat but you get a hot drink, food and warmth before your comrades left behind on the beach. I was actually happy that every escape attempt failed for this character.

It wouldn't be so bad if there was some dialogue to help us identify with Tommy's fears or motivation but the first part of the film is played out in almost mute silence. A group of soldiers walk through Dunkirk without any conversation or discussion of their situation. Thousands of soldiers stand on the beach waiting for rescue with no-one apparently talking to each other. I'm sorry but this is just unrealistic. But then it's equally unrealistic for Tommy and his comrades to have walked through a clean and rather modern looking town of Dunkirk where there is no damage to any of the buildings, despite the fact that the enemy (don't mention the Germans) are attacking the place. Freshly swept roads, clean windows and picture perfect sandbags for the French army to hide behind - surely the filmmakers could have built a decent set to depict a war damaged section of town?

Christopher Nolan has said that he wanted to avoid CGI in this film and opt instead for a realistic approach. Okay, CGI has become all pervasive in modern films (and some of it is downright cheesy) but there's surely no reason why it couldn't have been used in this film to create the illusion of more soldiers on the beach or extra boats out at sea. Trying to depict such a large scale and epic event as Dunkirk in a realistic and authentic way is virtually impossible without using some CGI.

The cinematic device of three different story lines being told on three separate timescales just doesn't work in this movie. The constant jumping back and forth between the different threads leads to some jarring continuity effects. One minute the sky is overcast, the next it's clear and sunny. One moment it's nighttime, the next it's daytime. It's a shocking mess.

Halfway through the movie I found myself shifting around in my seat feeling increasingly irritated and it wasn't just the misadventures of our "hero". I realised it was the background music causing my discomfort; a relentless, monotonous assault on the ears. War might be hell but this soundtrack isn't far behind. When the small boats arrive at Dunkirk, a stirring rendition of 'Nimrod' from Elgar's 'Enigma' variations is played, albeit played at quarter speed. Is this really counted as being an original music score as stated in the credits? Sadly the answer appears to be yes because Elgar's music is no longer under copyright protection. The fact that somebody got credit for writing this particular section of "original" music is absolutely shameful.

The clichés: when Tom Hardy's pilot has a problem with his fuel gauge and has to start making manual calculations on what fuel he has left, what are the chances that he will actually run out of fuel before the film ends? Well knock me down with a feather! He's run out of fuel. Gosh, I never saw that plot twist coming

The young boy who jumps on the small boat at the last moment as it leaves England, not realising (in his naivety) that it could be a dangerous journey. What are the chances of him being badly injured or even dying? Oh look he's dead. Surprised? Well only by the manner of his death and the lack of concern from the skipper of the boat when told of what's happened.

What are the chances that our brave Spitfire pilot (who's just ditched in the sea) is going to be rescued from drowning at the very last second as the water laps over his head? What a cliffhanger! Our small boat gets there in the nick of time to save the day! On the edge of my seat and holding my breath with excitement? Er, no.

Then we have that ridiculous ending. After shooting down an enemy plane (don't mention the Germans) Tom Hardy runs out of fuel. In an outstanding display of flying skills, our pilot extraordinaire not only manages to glide his Spitfire up and down the beach a couple of times but shoots down a Stuka bomber in the process before making a picture perfect landing on the beach as the sun sets. Why bother landing on the beach? He could have flown back to England in time for tea and tiffin. As the sun goes down he destroys his aircraft so the enemy (please don't mention the Germans) can't get their hands on it. Quite frankly a crash landing would have been much more entertaining and an appropriate epitaph for this sorry farrago of a movie.

Verdict? This film is a turkey.

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

So, it looked promising and so lets start with the PROS;

The intro sequence all 6 minutes (including the first dive bombing) should have continued for the whole movie - EPIC!

That's it for pro's, really the rest will just make you depressed.

CONS;

A poorly cobbled together film without a story and achingly under- utilized actors.

The awfully executed chronology lacked any reference or worthy explanation, exposing the glaring continuity issues and unbelievable plot mechanics.

Sure tell a few different stories, but please at least maintain continuity WITHIN each story, it's as though the decision was made to have all these points of view early on - yet when it came time to film they did it over 2 days. A few extras lined up on a beach and some borrowed planes. F*$*. we are approaching the 2020's dammit - use some bloody good CGI as you clearly can afford it.

The movie fails to portray even a 1/1000th of the actual evacuation - there were +- 330 000 troops leaving and over 60 000 killed ( thanks Wikipedia) yet ... Nolan fails to deliver any inkling of that sort of magnitude. The Brits left behind 63,879 vehicles including tanks and motorcycles + 2,472 field guns .... holy s*$(. but do we see a single tank or gun ... maybe 5 trucks and tug boat --- woo ooh ...

also the ending is Horses excrement, climaxing with some stupid spitfire pilot who is SO worried about fuel, yet manages to fly around and engage bombers for the WHOLE FILM right up to, and after its engine stops ... SURE ... then it unbelievably swoops around with no engine (they obviously just cut the sound to make it look like the engine had stopped) and then swoops past TWICE along the beach and it is assumed by the plot that it engages and SHOOTS DOWN an approaching Stukka dive bomber -NO! NO! I CALL BULLSH$T MR NOLAN!

So major bullsh%t climax moment out of the way, onto the meat and bones of this cut and pasted high school conceived garbage pile.

Day, morning, evening, rough seas, very calm seas - NEVER bloody mind - just SHOOT the scene dammit! The "DAY" progresses achingly slowly and even although we see two sunrises / sunsets / a storm and everything in between we are meant to believe it all happens during these story points, what LAZY film making .... I do not believe.

I never much cared for this Mr Nolan chap - and now after wasting my few dollar I feel confused for the future of film making and even more disappointed than ever for the general intelligence of the world. Are audiences/critics really that shallow / attention deficit that they cannot come up with an honest review so that others may find out before wasting time and effort?

pathetic for a $150 Million budget. If i could SAVE 50k p/a i'd have to work for 20 YEARS just to make 1/150th of the budget... and yet THIS is the result. These people are living in a ridiculous reality paid for by you and I>

Yes, awful. How can anyone honestly give this film a positive recommendation? It is so amateurish. Whoever wrote the screenplay forgot the story. What story is it! It's not about Dunkirk, the famous WWII evacuation of British troops from France. What about the French troops? The British commander says to hell with them. Two cowards are the focus of the story. They will do anything to get out ahead of everyone else who are patiently waiting, keeping order, and waiting their turn. One other is picked up by a civilian boat on its way to rescue troops at Dunkirk, and he fights the crew to not go back. He kills one of them. Great story? I figure they used 5 planes to make the entire film: three RAF fighters, one German fighter, and one German bomber, all classic planes. Why I say this is b/c they only show three RAF fighters in one scene, and then it's always a one-on-one with all the other scenes. The special effects are from the 1950's. I think they did a better job in Wings, 1927. Also, it's hard to figure out what they are saying. I missed half the dialogue, but I didn't miss much b/c it's so worthless a film. It's aimless, boring, pathetic, and cheap. There is nothing epic about this film. It's a sad joke. What a waste of my money. It's one of the most over-rated films of all time.

I am sure that the critics that write the reviews are paid shills because anyone who considers that movie to be a masterpiece has either never seen a war movie or is just taking money to lie to the public.

Dunkirk was more spectacular than 7 or so boats, 3 planes and less than 300 men in a line on a beach.

And whose idea was it to pay Tom Hardy a ridiculous sum of the budget to once again hide his face and never actually do what he is paid to do which last I checked was acting? It's obvious he was used in this movie to give it some credibility just like they did with the Mad Max debacle where he spent 3 quarters of the movie with a face covering on preventing him from speaking.

The noise was awful and apparently some of that noise was considered to be music! Dull bass throbbing in every scene.

Story? Lets not even go there. I can sum up the Story in one paragraph although you cannot really consider it a spoiler because there's nothing in this to spoil.

"Trapped on a beach awaiting rescue but the ships keep getting destroyed by dive bombers with only 3 planes to protect those ships. Ends with Hardy finally revealing his face when he is captured after landing his plane which has run out of fuel."

That's it. Everything else in between is just noise.

To the people who consider themselves to be critics I say this: If you want the movie industry to become like the gaming industry where the main goal is most profit in shortest time regardless of the content then keep spouting the BS otherwise you need to start telling the truth for once.

Two hours of noise and it cost them $100 million to make? It's obvious where that money went because these so called movie creators couldn't even be bothered to use CGI to expand the number of men, ships and planes to really set the scene.

There was nothing in this movie and Tom Hardy was thick or corrupt enough to be used as the marketing tool.

Don't waste your money.

Crow the critics are about Nolan's latest, "Dunkirk." A stunning masterpiece say many. Masterpiece my ass.

Snookered by the hype and war film fandom, ducats were placed on counter, a ticket for admission passed back. Lights dimmed, anticipation mounted, and... nothing. Nothing. Save lurching between disparate, battle set pieces featuring people for whom little or no empathy exists. Lacking investment in the characters, what remains are merely adequate, bloodless war scenes easily outgunned by the recent "Fury" and, farther back, "Saving Private Ryan." For example, a young boy is killed but we know nothing of him, nothing of his motivation for climbing aboard a civilian, Dunkirk-bound boat at the last minute. We feel nothing for him because he's simply a cardboard cutout.

As the actors barely register emotion, boredom set in and not to be shaken off. The characters move as wind-up toys. There are few actors who bare their soul like Cillian Murphy, here a shell-shocked survivor. As directed, he sleepwalks with the depth of an amateur in a high school production. He's not alone. All the actors turn in measured performances with identical blank looks and monotone deliveries. Particularly wasted is the actor's actor, Kenneth Branagh.

Certainly the bravery and sacrifice of civilian and military in the Dunkirk evacuation is celebrated in "Dunkirk." Thank you. However, this historical action occurred in 1940. Films echo the zeitgeist of the time in which they're produced. It's an odd choice to make a large (bad) film about an evacuation three-quarters of a century past. There's a stink of political agenda afoot in "Dunkirk" that's intolerable. The enemy, unseen in "Dunkirk," lurks and kills from safety by air and ground. Surrounded with backs to the the Atlantic, the very survival of a way of life is in question, as portrayed in "Dunkirk." (Spoiler Alert: The Allies Won The War.) The enemy's attacks are isolated like terrorism. The result is "Dunkirk" weaves a cautionary allegory mirroring religious extremism bent on destroying all non-believers.

Subtle propaganda is dangerous. "Dunkirk" fits that bill. Either that or Nolan is a complete idiot who hasn't a whit of sense. It's a toss-up based on a filmography including the lackluster borefest "Interstellar," and the beyond inane "Inception."

Nolan remains static in his career with "Dunkirk." His films are half-baked, underwritten, detached, and emotion-free. "Dunkirk" plays like a rough cut by a bad director who expects the viewer to emotionally fill-in-the-blanks. "Dunkirk" even lacks the courage of its convictions in being bloodless - there are no graphic deaths. At least Spielberg had the courage to rub the viewer's nose in the stench of death in "Saving Private Ryan." The first half hour of that film is unprecedented in the depiction of carnage (one can almost taste the grit of raining sand from nearby mortar strikes). Nolan sanitizes-for-your-own-protection. Yet he chose a violent topic and punked out; a war movie detached from death is not a film about war. By design, war cannot include gratuitous violence, just insanity - an element also lacking in "Dunkirk."

The wall-to-wall dramatic, but mixed low, score loses its effectiveness and becomes annoying. And, the constant, ham-handed crosscutting between stories further waters this already thin soup by stopping a scene's dramatic momentum.

A short scene in "Mrs. Miniver" (1942) featuring civilian Walter Pidgeon returning from Dunkirk in his shot up runabout says more in the visuals and a few lines of dialogue about the evacuation than the entirety of "Dunkirk." As Trump might Tweet, "Sad!"

Very disappointing because of:

*The worst voice quality of the recently watched films - terrible *Bad start ever, asphalt road, clear walls etc!!! *Too sterile pictures, sights - every body who starts a research will see on the old 1940s photos of Dunkirk that roads , buildings and coasts were full of mess, debris etc. *The casts have no faces, names like zombies - only a died boy's name - George- remained in my mind. There is no really main character(s) *Very poor views of the dogfights *Poor picture quality -grain noisy and sometimes the objects is out of focus- and camera movements compared example to the War for the Planet of the Apes - over all the best quality every levels, sound, voice, picture quality, camera movements actors performances etc.- and compared to other IMAX movies *I gave only 1 point because of these reasons, the huge budget and the very professional A list directors, crews and actors. The bottom of the B category for ~150 mil.

Finally I was a big Nolan fan but now I am very disappointed and a bit up set in turn I'm and my family big fan of the cinemas especially ODEON ISENSE with Dolby Atmos. Usually I didn't do reviews I'm sick of this terrible movies.

where to start ... WW2 ended over 70 years ago, so I thought it was the time to tell true stories about what happened back then, but I guess I was wrong, and the allies still need some sort of ego- boosters, where the Germans are portrayed as dumb with fighters made of paper. The movie is very boring and slow to be categorized under war genre, and you can see that clearly even on the faces of the actors ... 400,000 soldiers trapped on a beach, should be a movie scene that everyone will remember for years, yet all we saw were few bored soldiers standing in lines as if they were waiting for bathroom... the lines of people at movie theaters who went to watch this movie looked more crowded and alive than the 400K !! And where are all those civilians boats which everyone was talking about? I thought it was gonna be a huge fleet, yet they were no more than a dozen of them !!!! I am not gonna mention the background music as this was a disaster which needs a separate review by itself... save your time and maybe spend your money on buying any WW2 game which will be 100 times more exciting than watching this

I went to the cinema with good expectations. A great war movie.. Well.. It's wasn't great, and it wasn't a war movie..

400.000 men it said on the poster, if I would count there were at most a 1000.

Surrounded by Germans it said, maybe it was at the time I went to the toilet but no Germans seen here..

After 1 hour I really wanted to get out of the cinema, but I was not alone so eventually I stayed for the whole (too long) 1:45..

Don't go and pay money for this, if you really want to see it despite the awfulness this movie is, watch it on Netflix and buy a lot of beer to drink the story through..

...that movie was better than this.

I've seen plenty of horror movies... but not one has terrified me more than seeing this prime example of what Hollywood has come to now. The two hours of this film were just a disgrace of what a rich studio can do for a quick paycheque.

If Christopher Nolan wanted the audience to feel as shell-shocked and horrified as the characters in his movie, then he truly succeeded. I have never wanted to escape the situation of being in that theatre more than his characters wanted to escape that beach.

First of all, this isn't your typical war movie. There was no bloodshed, no gore, not even any real violence, which some might find refreshing. However, there was also hardly any dialogue and zero character/plot development...you know, things you would expect in a basic movie.

I wanted to care for the characters so badly, or anything that went on in this movie. But the scenes were either too dragged out, or they would cut out at odd times, leaving you with a general disconnect from what was going on in any scene. The only explanation for what went on was just in the form of incomprehensible murmurs from the actors. This movie was based on a heroic and honourable rescue mission, and if the audience was made known of this simple fact, it would have set such a better tone. This movie had so much potential. If Nolan focused more on plot development rather than aesthetics, this movie might've actually been worthy of the multiple Oscar nominations it is going to get.

To sum it up, this movie is basically a beautiful war-themed music video on mute. If you can appreciate that as a movie, then maybe you will enjoy Dunkirk. As for me, I'd rather watch worms hatch eggs than come anywhere close to a movie like this ever again.

I am fully disappointed with that movie. Brazilian specialized press is saying that is the best movie of the year. Elio Gaspari in his papers' column said today the movie is excellent. I fully disagree. First of all it is a boring movie. I had two or three times the wish of leaving the theater. As a matter of fact, some guys did so. Second, is a quite illogical movie, regarding space and time. They mixed together time shifted events, and I just realized that reading the critics. Third is a type of horror movie in which the intention is to scare you. Why the sound is so loud? I had the impression Count Dracula would show himself up to bite some soldiers' neck. After spending and loosing 5USD with the ticket and regretting not to leave the theater before movies end, I realized that was the worst movie on WWII ever shot. I dare to say that is the worst movie ever shot about any war, not just WWII.

The subject matter provided so much potential, so much opportunity - but instead it is unbelievably bad in almost every possible respect. It may have been closer to a Battle of Britain film than about Dunkirk.

For a film about Dunkirk I would watch the old one from the 1950's which is a little slow at the beginning as they develop the characters - but in the end the film so so much better having characters in it.

I guess the budget must have run out though - they didn't have enough money to buy any German uniforms. You don't see any German troops fighting. Even when they are in the boat all you see is bullet holes appearing but you don't see the Germans. Then at the very end of the film you see the pilot being taken prisoner by two Germans who are blurred out! Why was that?

What a disappointment!

The worst part was the tooth rattling and incessant background bass beat that seemed only loosely related to the equally deafening and incessant score. More intrusive even then the ridiculous soundtrack in Gravity during the destruction of the space station in airless space, the beat and the score in Dunkirk drowned out what limited dialogue and atmosphere was present in every scene of the movie, even trespassing a bit on the hammy and over-extended scenes with Kenneth Branagh (no real loss there, I guess). When you can't hear the Merlin engine of a Spitfire from the cockpit, then you know there's a problem.

Speaking of which, what can you say about Spitfire whose fuel and ammunition lasted forever, and whose terminal glide seemed even longer than that, and yet somehow apparently ended in the timely destruction of a Stuka mid-dive bombing?

I cannot fathom the positive reviews this film received.

It wasn't even that impressive as a spectacle. Where were the masses of abandoned equipment and materiel? Some stacked crates right at the start, and a single anti-aircraft gun? The opening scenes on the beach of Saving Private Ryan left an impression 100 times stronger than this entire film.