re: Dunkirk discussion (NO SPOILERS)

One place to start the story of Dunkirk is 1866. That is when modern Germany was created out of Prussia and dozens of smaller principalities. In 1870 Germany seriously kicked French booty, occupied Paris and forced the largest single surrender of all time. The Germans trapped an army of 104K soldiers and also emperor Napoleon III. That was actually near Sedan.

In 1914 the Germans planned to run that same play again. The French burned for revenge.

In 1914 the Germans were planning to drive through Belgium and down to gay Pareee. That didn’t work and a horrible stalemate ensued. Six million dead soldiers in France. The Brits deployed an army to help the French. They defended from the coast inward on the Allied Left. In one week in 1915 the Brits had 50,000 killed. The whole war in Viet Nam in a week.

As the German invasion of France loomed in 1940, the German General Staff planned to run the same plan. It didn’t work in 1914 of course. A junior general named Heinz Guderian was aghast. Not 1914 again!!

He got an appointment to see Hitler and sold him on the plan below.




Instead of attacking along the coast as in 1914, Guderian suggested a feint into Belgium which the Allies would react strongly to. Then knife into France south of that Allied force and drive to the to the coast. You can see Dunkirk on the map on the upper left.

The French and Brits did drive their best and most modern combat units into Belgium, playing the role the Germans wanted – to perfection. The Allies reacted to the 1914 plan.








Above: General Heinz Guderian, the architect of the German plan in 1940. Fittingly, this picture shows the emphasis the Germans placed on rapid communications. The device at the bottom of the picture is the Enigma decoding machine. It could do 900 billion billion computations. About this same time the Brits were beginning to break the code – which the Germans considered unbreakable. The Brits used the first real computer, code named COLOSSUS. COLOSSUS would take in a German coded message and spit out the decoded message in about 8 hours. COLOSSUS was the brain child of Alan Turing. He was a stone cold genius.

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Yea, Nolan said he wanted it to be like a virtual reality experience, and by the reviews it sounds like he achieved that

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What separates directors like Nolan, Spielberg, Scorsese, Chazelle is that they aren't only masters at their craft, they have a unique knowledge and appreciation for the history of their craft and what its purpose is at the core (to tell the best story possible).

This is where I think the Michael Bay's of the world err. George Lucas has thesame issue too. They go for a "bigger is better" approach with technology, which isn't outright bad, except they often seem to lose focus of the actual purpose of filmmaking.

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This dude have XXX a fresh rating and gave Moonlight rotten

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I don't expect a person to agree with the tomatometer, and it can be deceiving for an indivdual reviewer because it is binary, and a mixed review may be counter to the consensus but not far off.

This is where metacritic is useful. For example, Cole rated The new Mummy as rotten so it looks like he's in line with consensus of 15%.

However, he gave it a 2/4, so he rated it higher than Dunkirk. In addition, the metacritic score for the Mummy was 34 so his 50 was 16 points higher, whereas his 37.5 (rounded to 38) for Dunkirk is not only 12.5 points lower, it is 58.5 lower than the metacritic score. So he essentially views The Mummy 75 points better relative to the average than Dunkirk.

I get that it's subjective, but that sort of discrepancy makes me question his credibility as a critic. Although he's no Armond White.

I am not sure of the state of the narraative on this now. Hitler did pause the Panzers; they might likely have driven through the French and Brits and wrecked any attempt at evacuation. This is always referred to as one of Hitler’s greatest blunders. The reasons for this are either myriad or they aren’t. Goering wanted the Luftwaffe to have a great victory, or not. The Germans hoped to inflict great damage to the RAF and the RN as a precursor to the invasion of England, or they didn’t. Hitler wanted the Brits, as fellow Aryans, to help him strike the Russians, or he didn’t. The Panzers were run down and needed rest and a maintenance stand down, or they didn’t.

In any case, the Brits got away by the skin of their teeth. The troops pulled off the beach were the nucleus of the army the Brits had to build up to resist the Axis powers. Had those guys all gone to the POW cages, the effect on the rest of the war is incalculable.

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Known Nolan hater just rated it 100 on metacritic. The hype is real.

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I may have missed one, but looking quickly she has a review for 5 Nolan films (before Dunkirk), since Batman Begins and excluding The Dark Knight Rises.

Her most favorable review was a 60 (Interstellar), which was also the closest she was to the metacritic score, still 14 lower. She had an average of 46, which was 27.2 points lower than the average of 73.2, so to give a film a 100, and 4 points above the composite, is quite atypical and hopefully promising.

Could this end up being one of those films where there is a huge divide between professional critics and the masses?

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Who is going to see this tonight?

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<---- this dude!

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Could this end up being one of those films where there is a huge divide between professional critics and the masses?

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I don't think so. Usually those films are more character driven with deep themes that appeal to the critics but not necessarily the average movie goer. An action packed war film doesn't really fit the mold.

In addition, usually Nolan films are better received by the audience than the critics. He has an average critic tomatometer score of 84.4% for his 9 movies, but the audience rated them as 89%, with only Insomnia rated lower. The average user rating on rottentomatoes and metacritic also show a similar trend.

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Could this end up being one of those films where there is a huge divide between professional critics and the masses?

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I've seen some reviews from those lucky enough to get an early viewing, and it seems to be pretty in line with critics.

I am going in with high expectations, though.