Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Dunkirk - Movie Review

Watched the movie they say is Christopher Nolan's greatest ever and one of the greatest war movies ever made on Prasad's IMAX screen. Overall it left me feeling nothing much. My nephew Shrinjay warned me that the review were that grown men were crying like babies. I am a grown man and am prone to crying like a baby when things touch me, but Nolan and his master piece did not so it is not great in my book. Nor did Anjali cry (she got bored), nor did Pooja nor Shrinjay. Big scale, big screen, big story but left me feeling nothing.

It took a while for us to figure out what a mole was and why people were running on to the mole. The sea story of the boat owner who decides to take his boat to respond to the call made by the British Navy had some meat. The young soldier's who survive Dunkirk  somehow do not. perhaps because the main heroics come from the boat owners, the aircraft pilots and a perhaps the leaders who decide to stay back to evacuate the French soldiers. Very little from the soldiers themselves who are all into self preservation.

Dunkirk was the French beach where Allied soldiers got trapped by oncoming German forces and it was pretty hopeless for them because they were just sitting ducks for German aircraft. The hopelessness, comes across a bit but that's about it - there is no other emotion I felt. Save the moment when the small boats arrive in a group, or when Churchill's speech is read. For this scale and this story that is a huge disappointment. And for all the authenticity, the  behavior of the soldiers was almost contemporary. There was a way they moved, spoke, behaved and perhaps the boat owner was the one who got it right. All else could have been today's people.

For me, it did not work. It was a wasted two hours. I would now like to see the older version of Dunkirk. 

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