When accosted by a young GI outside of a USO show in Naples, who wanted to know where he could get a pistol that fired 20 times without reloading like the one Bogart used in a movie, Bogie replied "Ain't Hollywood great?!"
I saw Dunkirk last Friday night. I went into it not expecting a documentary that would explain the whole Dunkirk evacuation from all angles, rather I wanted to get a "feel" for it- the feeling of panic, hopelessness (and hope), terror, and psychosis experienced by the guys who lived and died there. So what if there were inconsistencies and confusion? It depicted war, and isn't that what happens in war? I feel that the director captured the essence of the operation from the little guy's viewpoint- the little guy who was scared sh*tless and only saw bits and pieces of the whole thing, and afterward probably remembered those bits in a non-sequential manner.
Don't go if you are only interested in a history lesson. You won't get it- the why's, wherefor's, and analyses one would expect in a seminar, book, or documentary don't exist in this movie. What you will get is a sensory bombardment that gives we non-combatants a little idea of "what it was like to be there." I think that was the true intent of the production staff, and as such I feel that they nailed it.
I liked it so much that we're going to see it on an IMAX screen again this Friday night.
I knew an aged guy who was there, as a young officer in the Royal West Kents whose unit was tasked to the rear guard and who was captured in the end and spent the next five years as a POW. His accounts of what he experienced didn't jibe with a lot of what I had read about it. I chalk that up to "the fog of war"- a fog that clouds the thoughts of those who research it after the fact and those who lived it. (After the war he mustered out in Marseilles, France, took all of his back pay and bought a sail boat. 50 years later he was on his 4th boat and had circumnavigated the world a couple times and bummed around every body of water on the planet, working his way as he went. He had never set foot back home in England during all those years. Everybody reacts differently to horror- but boy could he tell stories over pints of cold beer, as long as you were buying!)
