Dunkirk

Spoilers for the movie Dunkirk ahead!

More on the sombre war-is-bad front, Captain, Autofix and I went to see Dunkirk today. It's the latest Christopher Nolan movie, set during World War II. My knowledge of history and geography is rubbish, so I had not heard of Dunkirk (which is a city in Northern France), nor the famous Dunkirk evacuation, which lead to Churchill's famous "we shall fight on the beaches" speech that I only know about because we studied it in English class as an example of the power of repetition.

...we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender...

The movie starts with Timeline 1 - The Mole. In a horrible misunderstanding that Captain finds hilarious, both Autofix and I thought "the mole" referred to a mole in the army, and we both spent the entire movie waiting to see who would turn around and betray the team. But no, the mole refers to this part of Dunkirk which the English army used to dock boats for the soldiers to escape. Another definition for mole is "a large solid structure on a shore serving as a pier, breakwater or causeway".

By Paul Reed - ww2battlefields.com - Dunkirk Mole, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12633336

The movie really does make you feel the horrors of war.

A quick recap for those, who like me, are not familiar with the Dunkirk evacuation. During WWII, Belgian, British and French troops were cut off from the rest of France by German soldiers. They were lined up on the beach trying to escape, but that left them sitting ducks to German planes flying overhead. The English were trying to defend France from the Germans, but in what Churchill labelled "a colossal military disaster", they were trapped in Dunkirk and hoped to evacuate as many soldiers as they could to have an army large enough to defend England. At the start of the movie, we discover that Churchill hoped to evacuate 30,000 troops from Dunkirk... of the 400,000 troops that were stranded.

And that's about all the exposition you get from the movie. It's a rollercoaster from there, and you'd better be paying attention, because the movie doesn't stop to tell you what's going on. I really struggled telling a lot of the characters apart, I am starting to think maybe I do have a problem with faces, and since a majority of the characters were dressed in the same army clothes, most of them looked the same to me. :(

The mole was required because the large ships couldn't get close enough to the beach for the soldiers to board, as the water was too shallow. As I mentioned above, this made it a great target for the German bomber planes. In the hopes of trying to rescue as many people as possible, the English Navy requisitioned a heap of civilian boats, and had them sail to Dunkirk and try to pick up as many soldiers as they could. Timeline 2 of the movie follows one of these boats, The Moonstone, captained by someone who doesn't seem to want to be there, but still wants to do the right thing.

Another thing I liked about this movie was that it pulled no punches. There was none of that "we're the great patriotic soldiers who are willing to throw our lives away for our country and are willing to go off on a solo mission to save the day". It was a bunch of people who were sick of fighting, and were scared for their lives, and who just wanted to go home. One of the earlier scenes shows two characters who notice one of the injured soldiers laying in a stretcher isn't actually dead, so they rush to get him on board the ship that's about to leave. It looks like a heroic feat, but once they make it on the boat, you realise they only did it because they knew it would get them on the boat ahead of the thousands of people in line ahead of them.

Despite the fact that the English and French were fighting together, the movie also didn't pull any punches in the sense that even though the English and the French were stranded together, the English were all for evacuating the English soldiers only, and the French were told to wait.

Anyway, the ending of this movie was a foregone conclusion if you knew anything about the evacuation, but as someone who didn't know about Dunkirk, it was still exciting. However, I knew that the Germans lost the war, so I was expecting the English and the French to have a 300-style crush the enemies stand-off. And I was expecting there to be a mole. So I was thoroughly disappointed on both those fronts.

I am not generally a fan of war movies, but I really enjoyed this one. It wasn't just gratuitous violence, and people dying left, right and centre. It wasn't some crazy action-heavy adventure, but at the same time, the movie didn't stop to breathe, and every moment was captivating.