If you want to see a movie no character development, not understand what anyone is saying and even know the names of the characters then this is the movie for you.
Also, how was Tom Hardy able to coast in his plane for a least a day and not even land on the allied beach?
Spitfires were actually well known for their gliding ability. It was quite accurate. And he did land on the beach. Did you fall asleep? Furthermore, this wasn't a movie about characters. It was more about the collective experience of surviving a harrowing ordeal such as this. I found it to be very effective in that regard. And what do you mean "not understanding what anyone is saying," they were speaking? Do you not speak english?
Great movie: 9/10
I thought the same thing. It seemed like they were talking in some sort of English/Scottish jibberish. We see Hardy shoot down the enemy bomber and the Allies on the beach cheer for him but then he coasts in the air for it seems like half day and then lands 100 miles away only to be captured by the Germans. Why didn't he just land where he would be safe?
shareIt would make sense for him to ditch in the sea where the boats would pick him up.
shareDitching is very dangerous. And he couldn't really deviate much as he had no fuel left. Thats why he had to land where he did. He had to glide down as gently as possible. Not an easy feat.
shareAt best the glide ratio of a Spitfire is 15:1 @ 95 MPH (15 feet forward to 1 foot down). So once out of fuel, he would have rapidly lost his speed due to friction and that climb to get the bomber. He would have had to go noise down to keep the 95 MPH. He was only a few hundred feet up passing over the beach so he would have landed in under 2 minutes of flight.
I trained in a Cessna 172 and that had a glide radio of 7:1 @65Kmph. At a general aviation airport the pattern altitude is 1000 feet AGL (above the ground). Once the engine cut that gave you just under 2 minutes of flight time and 7000 feet of forward travel to play with once you lost your airspeed which dies off pretty fast as you keep having to add back pressure to stay level. Keeping the best glide speed is important once you are in a noise down power off configuration. Any speeds higher or lower mean your decent rate is going to increase.
He also should have had plenty of fuel as the plane has 2x 48 gallon front tanks and 2x 33 gallon rear tanks. He should have entered the battle with about 2hr of fighting fuel and enough to return to base. He also didn't have a reserve tank which is mounted under the plane at the end of the movie to switch too. The reserve is a drop tank, which they switch too and use up right after takeoff to extend the range of the fighter. They drop them before entering combat as they slow the aircraft down and make a nice target.
I was a good war movie, but very misleading. The sky was full of aircraft and the German pilots were almost all aces by that point. They had been fighting in the Spanish Civil War and the Blitz across Europe. The RAF losses at Dunkirk and the battles leading up to it were almost 300 aircraft. The pilots were very young and had no real combat training. The city was destroyed and the French and British troops holding the line fought hard and almost always to the death.
95mph? Why would he be cruising at a fraction of the plane's top speed.
Veterans give accounts of 15 minutes of gliding in a Spitfire, thanks to it's glide profile being almost flat at top speeds.
Not cruising speed, gliding speed (as in out of fuel). Best glide speed (Vbe) means the forward speed you can get the most distance for every foot of lost altitude. 15 minutes of glide is from the max ceiling the aircraft can travel at. But he was only a few hundred feet off the ground at the time he ran out of fuel. Everything about flying is an energy exchange. Once you have no more thrust you exchange potential energy in the form of altitude for kinetic energy. There is a loss of energy due to drag so you can not keep swapping potential for kinetic and back and forth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_speeds
https://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2016/media/SE_Topic_16-01.pdf
But he was only a few hundred feet off the ground at the time he ran out of fuel.
Are you sure about that?
Yep, he flew across the beach and looked up and saw the Ju87 Stuka dive bomber coming to bomb the troops on the beach. He pulled up and shot it down. They should have edit it that he shot down the Ju87 and then ran out of fuel, it would have made more sense. Also he should have shot down the Ju87 after it was pulling out of its dive as that is when a dive bomber is low and slow and an easy target. But you know, its a movie and facts don't always matter.
shareNot when he engaged the STuka (off scree). But the moment he ran out of fuel/propulsion, he wasn't a couple of hundred feet up. He was still a couple of minutes from the beach when that happened.
shareThat is when he switched to the magical reserve tank that he didn't have attached to the airplane.
Anyways my point is the movie failed to show the intense pressure the Luftwaffe was putting on the RAF and the expeditionary forces. The British and French forces really put up a good fight and suffered a lot for what they did.
So what you'r saying is that you don't know from what altitude the Spitfire had to start gliding.
The vast majority of RAF involvement took place inland from Dunkirk, trying to prevent the Luftwaffe from getting to the evacuation beaches.
Concentrating on one pair of fighters who happened to become engaged en route to Dunkirk from England allowed them to dovetail the three perspectives into one set piece moment off- shore
The movie was intense pressure from beginning to end.
The suffering and the toils of the men involved was represented.
I don't know what skepticism about how long a Spitfire can actually glide for has to do with the point about suffering though.
It would have made sense for him to land by his fellow soldiers. I am pretty sure they would have moved for him to land there.
shareThe President speaks English but he does not speak Tom Hardy Revenant mumbo jumbo.
shareI agree. Some of the visuals were great but this was an average movie at best....m
shareI agree as well. That's how I would describe the movie.
shareIf it wasn't a Nolan movie then it would have been panned hard.
shareThe editing was way below average though.
The great visuals were few in number - instead we got plenty of lengthy scenes of some dude staring into the distance with loud background music.
Yes, Mr. President, you have some excellent points there. This seemed like an impression of the battle rather than the real battle.
😎
Spitfire flight duration... the movie has three different, intertwined, timelines...
the timeline for the spitfire scenes was short, less than the duration it takes to get from the UK to Dunkirk... so all the spitfire scenes collectively are less then a couple if hours at most... notice, there are no night scenes in the air.. so it wasn't flying for very long...
the timeline for the young soldier trying to get off the beach was longer, more than a day... you can see it go dark and then light again
the timeline for civilian rescue boat was somewhere in between, i think...
as to the dialogue, you guys should try to go to theatres that invest and maintain good equipment and calibration... it was crystal clear at my local IMAX theatre...
Going to try and watch this again but on mute with subtitles on.
shareIt doesn't matter about timeline. I got it from the viewing this movie at once. It was just boring in my opinion. There was no dialogue, no one to connect to. It was a a weak movie from my perspective.The way I feel it is extremely over hyped! The mass crowd is so gullible! If mass media says that something is good, then it must be true. That's how I feel about this movie.
shareWhat is the purpose in jumping around in time? I realized after the first night back to day scene what was happening, but it just made no sense why it was happening. It seemed like a distraction b/c the movie was so average.
There were far too few boats rescuing the soldiers. The Foyle's War episode about it seemed to have almost as many and they didn't even have shots of them at Dunkirk (only the return home). The number of planes wasn't as big a problem for me, but if you're going to do a movie about the evacuation of 300.000 men from the beaches, there needs to be more than 20 boats shown on screen. The movie had a budget of at least 100,000,000 so I can't imagine that was the issue.
exactly...
shareUnfortunately war films today want to go the Black Hawk Down route which is where the entire movie is just action and we don't know a thing about any of the people involved. For some reason people seem to think that is deep, but I recognize it as shallow and all style over substance.
shareThe film didn't really have a story and it was boring and uninteresting.
A couple of tense scenes but that was it.
So disappointing.
Hacksaw Ridge, now there is a great war story.
This was just an hour and a half of young people running away from war.
And at the end they were all made out to be heroes....When all they did was survive.
They weren't heroes they were just lucky to of survived. There was absolutely no fighting in this "war film".
the event described in this movie was just a day at best, how do you "develop" characters within such short amount of time?
shareI didn't say anything about character development.
But even still, there are plenty of films set only over 1 day that has good character development.
Deepwater Horizon is a good example off of the top of my head.
Titanic is another, that was only set over 1 or 2 days correct me if I'm wrong?
The lack of character development wasn't the problem for me anyway.
I just wasn't impressed with the story. It wasn't powerful enough.
I was expecting so much more. It wasn't a bad movie by any means. It just wasn't a great one. I think a 6ish score is very accurate of the quality. Of course this being a Nolan movie there is going to be a very vocal group of insanely devoted fans that find that rating monstrous.
shareYeah, I gave it a 6 too.
shareThe excuse I keep getting is "there were over 400,000 men at that battle, do you really want a backstory on every single one of them?"
Schindlers list was about 1100 people surviving the holocaust and there was plenty of character development in that.
Another classic is: "this is war, we don't want scenes of people sitting around a campfire". Hmmmm I seem to remember a campfire scene in Apocalypse now which was a lot better than Dunkirk, black hawk down and we were soldiers combined.
i think the point is that it is refreshing to see a blockbuster wartime movie that doesn't just rehash tropes from previous films... and it worked 😎
Is it the best wartime movie ever? of course not, but it is distinctive and a good movie...
It was okay lol.
Just nowhere near worthy of the 8.3 rating it has on imdb.
Really? I felt it was just doing the same thing Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers did?
sharei haven't seen those so can't compare
shareBlack Hawk Down is about 2 and a half hours and 2 hours of it are an action sequence. You barely get to learn anything about anyone. I am guessing Brukheimer (sp?) saw Saving Private Ryan 3 years earlier and said to himself "wow that opening battle scene was so cool, what if someone made a movie that was 80% a battle scene". If they wanted to make an action film I am fine with that, what pisses me off though is that somehow we've gotten to this idea that a war movie has to be nothing but action and that makes it deeper than other war films that have actual characters, plots, themes and messages to it.
shareExactly and the very few characters we got were boring and cliched.
share