BEFORE: All right, finally back on World War II stuff - I'm jumping ahead almost 500 years in British history to WW2, and I've got those two films about Churchill on tap, so I'm gonna knock them all out during my 10-day BritFest 2019. Tomorrow I'm back on the Royals, but I've been trying to get to "Dunkirk" for what feels like a very long time.
Jack Lowden carries over from "Mary Queen of Scots", where he had a lead role as Darnley (not Dudley).
THE PLOT: Allied soldiers from Belgium, the British Empire, and France are surrounded by the German army and evacuated during a fierce battle in World War II.
AFTER: If you've already seen "Dunkirk", and have also read my blog for any length of time, you can probably predict what I'm going to complain about today, and it's the split timeline of the film, combined with what amounts to excessive time-jumping. Because the secret to understanding this film is realizing that there are three different timelines, representing three different aspects of the Dunkirk evacuation - the POV of the soldiers on the beach, the POV of a civilian charting a boat across the English Channel, and the POV of a fighter pilot performing air support.
These timelines cover some of the same ground, but one (soldiers on the beach) starts one week before the others, the second (the civilian boat) covers one day of action, and the third (fighter pilot) constitutes one hour of action. Naturally one would expect the timelines to meet up in the end, when their actions overlap and each becomes relevant to the other two, but the problem is that the entire film cuts between the three timelines, as if they are all happening simultaneously, but they're not. A few words on-screen at the start of each segment explains the format, but it's not enough - the two hours that follow then cut back and forth from Sunday to Friday (let's say...), then back to Sunday, then on to Saturday, back to Friday, back to Sunday, forward to Saturday again, then to Monday, etc.
HOW THE HELL is anyone supposed to be able to follow this? Without words on-screen at the start of each segment, throughout the WHOLE FILM, please, it becomes one giant puzzle trying to determine what happened when. And somehow, God knows how, this won an Oscar for BEST EDITING? That's a travesty, a disaster, a god-damned farce. What it reminded me most of, because this is a technique often used in film, cutting between three related actions, was the last battle in "Return of the Jedi", when they cut from Luke fighting Vader and the Emperor on the Death Star, to Han and Leia with the Ewoks battling the ground forces on the Endor Moon, to Lando and the Rebel fleet attacking the Death Star in ships. Ideally, it should all come together and build to a climax, with each segment affecting the others.
But that's not an appropriate format for the events of Dunkirk, which played out over a week's time. Yesterday I complained about "Mary Queen of Scots", how the film skipped over two decades of the Queen's imprisonment, and she showed up for her execution looking just as young as she did before she got locked up - and the audience didn't get to FEEL her time in prison, because the film just sort of skipped over it. That same thing happens here, because the soldiers spent 5 or 6 days on the beach, not knowing if ships were going to arrive to help them evacuate, and during that time, they were sitting ducks for bombings from the Axis forces. We should FEEL this long period of time, even if it's not exactly the most cinematic thing, because that was the situation. By cutting ahead to the actions of 5 days later, and seeing a civilian boat take off from England, we know almost right away that help is due to arrive at some point. Yes, anyone who's studied the Dunkirk evacuation would know this, but tipping the story's hand at this point also removes any dramatic tension that might have been achieved by depicting the soldiers NOT KNOWING if help was going to arrive.
The single most dramatic moment in the film should have been the civilian ships arriving, quite unexpectedly, in an unprecedented show of civilian support for a military cause - but that's semi- ruined if we KNOW they're on the way, right? By the same token, we see the soldiers wondering, "Where is the RAF? Why no air support?" But cutting ahead to Saturday's action, we the audience also know that three Spitfires are on the way, and they only take an hour to cross the Channel - so again, no dramatic tension, no build-up of lost hope that can be defused by the unexpected arrival of a fighter plane or two. It's a weird way to run a picture, that's all I can think. I'm keeping a list of all the films that use this trendy split-timeline technique, because it's going to save time at the end of the year if I can complain about them all at once, instead of individually.
Have I got issues with each of the three storylines? Yeah, probably, but they're overshadowed by the MASSIVE complaint over the structural problems here. Maybe there was no other way to get all of this information into the picture in an interesting way, but isn't that the director's job, to FIND a way to make the information interesting? And I would add a parenthetical tip - please try to do so without violating all the rules of time and space. It's a crutch here, once you acknowledge that there's a long, boring period of time spent by the soldiers on the beach with nothing to do, I can see how one might want to develop some sort of work-around to deal with it, but this just shouldn't be the way. Same problem with the fighter pilot, if he's introduced too late into the film, he's going to feel like a last-minute deus ex machina, something unexpected that appears on the scene and saves the day. Still, starting his story early in the film when he's not relevant until the end shouldn't be the solution. I mean, nobody wants to see the pilot sleeping or eating his meal or running some entirely different mission before being sent to Dunkirk, but mixing up the scenes in what equates to random order just should not be allowed.
I'm fairly sure that as a result of all this time-jumping the civilian vessels were requested BEFORE they were needed, that right there is an example of how nonsensical the final product is. I mean, I know that an army can often make requisitions that don't seem to make sense, but this is beyond belief. I would love to see a version of this film re-edited to focus entirely on the beach events for the first hour, let's say, and then introduce the civilian boat captain at the start of the second hour, which would make sense - this way he would find out about Dunkirk at the right time, when his boat was needed. Right? And then we wouldn't have to watch the same events play out over and over, just seen from different perspectives. At least, I think that's what was happening, the overlapped parts ended up being as confusing as hell.
To put things in a larger perspective, the evacuation at Dunkirk saved over 300,000 men, but at that point 68,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force had been killed, and many members of the Rear Guard at Dunkirk were captured as prisoners of war. Churchill declared that while the evacuation was a success, it was anything but a victory, saying that "wars are not won by evacuations". An astounding amount of materiel was also left behind, but had the British and French forces remained at Dunkirk and perished, World War II might have had a very different outcome. The smarter move at that point was to retreat, regroup, re-arm and then try to get some more support from Allied forces. But I had to learn the importance of the evacuation on my own from Wikipedia, this didn't necessarily come across in the film.
Also starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard (last seen in "Legend"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh (last heard in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Cillian Murphy (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Mark Rylance (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Tom Hardy (last seen in "Venom"), John Nolan (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises") and the voice of Michael Caine (last seen in "The Weather Man").
RATING: 5 out of 10 life-jackets
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