Dunkirk (2004)

Too much of everything

The Worst Film Ever

i must have seen a different film!!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is a documentary of the Dunkirk evacuation over 10 days in the summer of 1940. The British Expeditionary Force is trapped against the coast along with French and other Allies. It is purported to be accurate. There are the shakey cam recreations intersperced with some old footage. There are recognizable actors. It's quite straight forward in its telling. After watching Nolan's Dunkirk recently, this is a good companion piece. It has some more information and the rear guard action that is missing from Nolan's movie. There are compelling real historical figures. It's solid work for TV doc that is compelling to watch all the way to the end.

I couldn't watch this program all the way through. It's an important subject, the performances are decent, the reenactments convincing, the interior monologues touching, and the budget was adequate.But it's ruined by the directorial style. The camera seems to be held by a drunk. It wobbles all over the place. There are zip pans from one face to another, and multiple closeups of faces. One pivotal figure, Tennant of the RN, muses over the task he's faced with. And what does the screen show us? A safety razor placidly plowing through a cream-coated face, leaving some ugly black stubble in its wake.I think this fad -- the cinema of hypermania -- may have begun with MTV because, after all, you can't expect an audience of fourteen year olds to sit quietly and watch a static shot of Elton John playing the piano. You must keep their attention prisoner by cutting rapidly from his face to his fingers to his feet to his shades and when you run out of that, you introduce a display of fireworks.Maybe it's my fault because I'm too tired or too old. I was very disappointed.

Having recently watched this again, for a third time, I must strongly disagree with a previous reviewer who described this as meretricious rubbish.It's true, some of the camera work was a little intrusive, and sometimes the music also got in the way, but these are minor irritations. On the whole, I thought the filmmakers told the story very well. Bearing in mind that at the time the incidents displayed were over over sixty years old, it must have been very difficult to tell the stories of so many men - from the government down to a private on the ground - with complete balance and historical accuracy, but overall I found everything very believable. The acting was top notch, with some well known faces, and Timothy Dalton's narration was also top drawer.I would recommend this series wholeheartedly.

Curious programme as it seems to almost deliberately and consciously write the Merchant Navy out of the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. Even when what is clearly a Merchant ship is being attacked by Stukas, in contemporary black and white film, the narrator refers to Royal Navy destroyers! When Merchant ships are referred to they are almost invariably called personnel ships or supply ships, almost never Merchant ships. The only actual reference to a Merchant ship is where one is on fire and a group of Royal Navy people go onboard to fight the fire. Even then there don't seem to be any Merchant Navy people present. Is this a deliberate omission, or one based on ignorance?