I assume I'll be in the minority here, but I feel the movie was the first half, that's where the story should have been. The first half kept me on suspense, and even made me jump. But the anticipation quickly turned south with the second half, in fact, it became a little absurd.
Without getting into too much detail, did they hire former Galactic Stormtroopers for the German parts? In fact, that whole scenario reminded me of one too many video games, set on Rookie level.
There's some other issues that really ruined it for me too. But the movie should have been focused on No Man's Land, and the goal could have been the focus of the last 15 min.
Last edited by TerribleTwo; 01/13/2002:30 PM.
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How can a war film from 1958 not be "too sterile and too clean"? Did it have a very graphic depiction of battle wounds such as gaping holes in chests or dismembered limbs?
Or do you mean something else?
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
When it was made most people knew what had happened and didn’t need a long set up to describe the situation.
There is blood and death in it, but not gore. For example, the Stuka attack. In the new film the point of view is pretty scary watching it on the movie screen. On tv not so much. The 1958 film has the Stuka attack in a more 3rd person view. You are with the Tommie's and feel their fear as the attack commences. Their fear and resignation of what is about to happen is palpable. You don’t get a cool cg picture. You get a glimpse of the psychological effect of what is about to happen.
The newer film is very nicely photographed with the flight scenes a wonder. But, on a gut level it doesn’t have the impact of the earlier film.
I own copies of both films but I will watch the “Corp” lead his men to the beaches over the pretty new film without hesitation.
The Nolan's Dunkirk is just empty. Dunkirk was a mess with a lot fo equipment and hundreds of thousand soldiers on or near the beach... The town was bombed as hell, there was destroyed houses, fires... Nolan made his choices, I understand that, but it was bad choices in my opinion.
#4503843 - 01/15/2009:03 AMRe: 1917 - not the movie it could have been.
[Re: Roudou]
How can a war film from 1958 not be "too sterile and too clean"? Did it have a very graphic depiction of battle wounds such as gaping holes in chests or dismembered limbs?
Or do you mean something else?
Originally Posted by Roudou
The Nolan's Dunkirk is just empty. Dunkirk was a mess with a lot fo equipment and hundreds of thousand soldiers on or near the beach... The town was bombed as hell, there was destroyed houses, fires... Nolan made his choices, I understand that, but it was bad choices in my opinion.
Since I been asked about my take on Dunkirk, I will post my reply here on what I think it's wrong with it.
I was swamped the other day when Mr. PanzerMeyer asked me about it (5 posts above this one) and I couldn't post a proper detailed educational response.
Not trying to hijack this thread.
First time I saw the very first teaser trailer of it in August 2016, I beyached on several movie sites about everything that is wrong with it.
Of course all the Nolan's Dark Knight's groupies and fan boys who never cracked open a history book and don't know nothing from nothing about Dunkirk came out from the woodwork and tried to shoot me down.
Here is the teaser:
My initial and immediate reaction to the Dunkirk teaser trailer:
"That Dunkirk beach looks too empty and clean and the troops were all too orderly in formation as if they were arranged by platoons and companies! Did no one involved in the production go online and looked at historical photographs of Dunkirk? Still looks way too clean and sanitized."
Now keep in mind that budget for this film has been reported as minimum of $100 million to as high as $150 million, not including domestic and worldwide marketing cost.
$100-150 million!!
That brings me to my next complaint:
Where did the money go?
In 1958 Dunkirk, you can see vehicles and equipment scattered throughout the beach.
Craters everywhere from the Luftwaffe bombing the beach.
You can see some of that in this YouTube video review of 1958 Dunkirk:
The producers also used real military vehicles and thousand of extras and real ships and boats.
Now the budget for Dunkirk 1958 was $1 million dollar, adjusted for inflation, that's about $9 million today.
They were able to do all that with $1 million dollar.
They didn't have any of the extras in the 1958 version holding cardboard cutouts to make it look like there are more people on the beach than they actually were.
They also didn't use cardboard cutouts of military vehicles and inflatable military vehicles like Nolan did.
Nolan had $100-150 million and he couldn't get more extras and real military vehicles and materiel?
AND if he couldn't get more extras and real military vehicles, with that kind of money he could had added them using CGI.
Also in Nolan's version, the beach was just one big long flat sand with no dunes and no craters in the sand even from the aerial shots.
If you GOOGLE real photos of Dunkirk, you will notice how the sand have dunes and craters from explosions caused by the bombing from the Luftwaffe.
and the classic 1969 war epic Battle of Britain, another movie that was also not about Dunkirk,
which haa a 29 seconds scene about 27 seconds in, showing the beaches of Dunkirk,
looked better, more historically accurate and detailed than Nolan's bloated $100-150 million dollar film.
This is my review of Dunkirk 2017 that I posted online in July 2017.
Quote
TYup! My take of the movie based on that one teaser trailer 8 months ago was right on the money.
This film is not so epic and sweeping as the trailers and the critics and online articles about it want you to think.
It's also not historically authentic.
Go GOOGLE and BING image search photos of Dunkirk and you will see the beaches full of men, chaos everywhere, war materiel and equipment and vehicles scattered all over it and most of it burning. All kind of boats and ships in the water trying to pick up 1000's and 1000's of men from the water.
Historical records show over 861 boats of all sizes showed up to pick up and help the evacuate over 330,000 men.
In the movie at the height of the evacuation, I counted maybe 2 dozen (boats, not men).
Nolan's version had men neatly in single and double file, plenty of clean empty sandy beach in between each row of men, boxes of ammunition neatly stacked up here and there, a few military trucks parked here and there - and this is even toward the end of the movie when they said they evacuated almost 400,000 men.
Throughout the entire movie, there wasn't anywhere near 10,000 men on the beach much less 400,000 men.
Furthermore these were men that have been fighting the Germans for almost 7 months starting back in Belgium and then pushed back into French until they were cornered at Dunkirk with the sea against their back.
Yet the troops all had nice clean brand new looking uniforms.
Also by the end of the movie the beach was still nice and neat and clean and devoid of any military equipment that was left behind by the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army.
According to WIKI:
The loss of materiel on the beaches was huge. The British Army left enough equipment behind to equip about eight to ten divisions. Discarded in France were, among huge supplies of ammunition, 880 field guns, 310 guns of large calibre, some 500 anti-aircraft guns, about 850 anti-tank guns, 11,000 machine guns, nearly 700 tanks, 20,000 motorcycles, and 45,000 motor cars and lorries. None of that was shown and with today's CGI technology, it would had been easy to show that on the beach right before the closing credits but no, as I've said the beaches were still nice and empty with clean sand during the final shots.
You really got to wonder where the $150 million budget went?
The air scenes with the Spitfires fighting the German Luftwaffe were filmed with real air worthy World War II airplanes so there was no CGI there.
Also the movie suffers from the same issues Interstellar had: you couldn't understand most of the dialogue.
I saw it in IMAX 70mm and most of the dialogue audio was too low or some of it because of the British accent, just came across as garbled mumbling.
But when the action started, the special effects sound of gunshots and boats and ships engines combined with the music track just drowned out all the dialogue tracks.
Sorry Nolan, I have been waiting to give you a chance to redeem yourself ever since your movie failures after the success of Inception but you haven't done so.
Inception is the only movie by Nolan that I liked.
The Prestige was alright.
Insomnia was a remake of a foreign film and a waste of 2 great actors and a great actress: Pacino and Williams and Swank.
I had high hopes for Interstellar but the explanation of the cause of everything in it and the ending was just asinine - it was made for audiences who are dumb and need to have ducking thing explained to them.
Here's my review of Interstellar from November 2014:
This movie is a fine example of why I think Nolan is an over-rated unoriginal plagiarizing hack!
His Dark Knight films were a sacrilegious actionable offense to all fine film makers.
If Stanley Kubrick wasn't rolling in his grave after the preposterous Gravity, he has to be rolling in his grave now.
0.5/5
Now my reaction to 1917 is the same especially after seeing the first teaser trailer in August:
and after seeing the first full trailer in October:
and remains the same after seeing the movie.
In 1917, most if not all the soldiers in the trenches look clean:
clean brand new looking uniforms, clean shaven.
Did they all just rotate back to the front from the rear or did they just arrive to the front by train?
The trench and its structures also look like it was just built.
It looks brand new and barely used.
Compare the trenches in 1917 to the trenches in these movies not about World War 1 but had World War 1 scenes:
The no man's land scene in 1917, much like the beaches of Dunkirk in Nolan's movie, just didn't have enough stuff in it:
barbed wires, obstacles, bodies, craters, burned out and destroyed structures, more bodies, etc.
Compare 1917 trenches and no man's land to this film made about the Western front from almost 90 years ago.
Or the remake of it from 40 plus years ago:
(that's full movie, I think the movie is on public domain now)
You won't ever be seeing a historically accurate war film nowadays,at least not from Hollywood,the audience has changed. They want big boom and lots of action and if the war machinery does 'impossible' things even better.
I watched the Nolan Dunkirk with my 83 y/o mum. She thought it was ok but said the '58 version was better but then she's a sucker for old war movies.
EV's are the Devils matchbox.
#4503949 - 01/16/2005:08 PMRe: 1917 - not the movie it could have been.
[Re: NoFlyBoy]
Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Elie Wiesel. Romanian born Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, Holocaust survivor. 1928 - 2016.
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. C.S. Lewis, 1898 - 1963.
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,468PanzerMeyer
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PanzerMeyer
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Excellent post NoFlyBoy and I agree with all your points.
Just like Chucky alluded to though, the audience of today is not the same as the audience in 1958. It's just the reality.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Saw 1917 today. A lot of good moments in it, a lot of bad. Considering what films generally do with war movies, not terribly surprised. I definitely liked the dedications at the end.
I'll stick with "Blackadder Goes Forth: Good-byeee".
SALUTE TO ALL!
#4504026 - 01/17/2011:35 AMRe: 1917 - not the movie it could have been.
[Re: NoFlyBoy]
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,468PanzerMeyer
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PanzerMeyer
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Originally Posted by NoFlyBoy
Thank you, everyone.
I took my sisters and brother to see it.
They are not World War II experts like I am.
To them Dunkirk is just a war movie.
They thought it was boring and one of my sister called it Dumb-Kirk.
It seems like your siblings are part of the mainstream casual audience which his perfectly fine of course but I think here on SimHQ we forget sometimes that the great majority of people fall under this category and NOT under the history buff/geek category that many of us do on SimHQ. We are a niche market.
Last edited by PanzerMeyer; 01/17/2011:35 AM.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
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