Dont expect to much Slippy.

@Injera -- re little ships -- yes they were important but most were crewed by the Royal Navy, not their owners; most shuttled soldiers from the beach to the big ships; most soldiers were picked up by the navy from the mole.

The common complaint at the time was the RAF was nowhere to be seen but as a C4 documentary proved recently, they were mainly too high up and too deep into France to be seen from the ground. The air battle is a significant part of the film and somewhere there was an interview with Nolan saying they compromised historical accuracy by giving the German planes yellow noses to make it easier to see who was on which side.

Search Youtube for war walks dunkirk for Richard Holmes's documentary (25 mins). It is a shame the BBC never released War Walks on DVD.

@Injera -- having said that, Holmes says largely civilian crewed, so take your choice. (Punting at Ascot not helped by typing here.)

No -- Holmes says civilian crews were often replaced for subsequent trips. (Still no winners.)

The first example on that page is 1939 and the one half way down clearly says france 1940?
Susprisingly for your by-the-book-follow-orders germans they seemed to have huge freedom in each squadron to paint them how they liked, so it varied.

(Those black and white stripes you see on allied planes were for the same reason, added time of D Day onwards to identify allies to stop friendly fire)

I would have said the Spitfire was rather obviously British...

I think the best part of the film was watching those scenes. A beautiful aircraft.

e.g.
http://www.vintagewings.ca/Portals/0/Vintage_Stories/NewsStoriesF/RoundelRoundup/Roundels81.jpg

Had a feeling it was just popular amongst the left wing media.

Slippy, the new Barry Norman.

I thought it was embarrassingly awful, 400,000 on those beaches and yet in Nolans view a few lines of blokes looking as if they're queuing for a p**s. The whole thing looked cheap, impossible to suspend disbelief when something is so lacking visually. No characters, no plot, incoherent pointlessly jumbled structure, and as a spectacle it failed on every level. Really looking forward to it too. A complete shame.

Just look at the Dunkirk scene in Atonement for a glimpse of how it should have been done...

Apologies, thought it hadnt posted so did it again but couldnt remember what I wrote the first time exactly...

That Atonement scene is in a different league lux.

Lux summed it up perfectly imo.

Slippy obviously hasn't seen the film imo. A phroum blagger it seems.

I've just got back from watching the film. First half an hour or so i thought there is no thread to this story and that it was a bit of a mess and a typical modern over the top drama. By the end i thought that it was in fact a decent/good film and imo well worth a watch.


Key points:

Don't forget this is a 12A rated film.

Those that say where are the 300,000 soliders. They were never all on the beach at the same time ffs. The evacuations lasted over a week! Look at the picture on wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation

Personally i'd rather watch a documentary than a film but i enjoyed this for what it is a 12A film.

This is not for the Mongs who like Tarantino.

I'm going to give this film 7.5/10

For under a tenner well worth a trip to the cinema.

looks like a marmite film

Extrakt aus Hefe?

It's a 19th-century German invention, oddly enough. It was Justus Freiherr von Liebig, possibly the greatest chemist who ever lived imo, who discovered how to concentrate and bottle brewer's yeast. He also invented the Oxo cube.

It was all part of his efforts to educate people in where the actual nutrition comes from in food. He got frustrated by people pouring away the fat and juices from meat, for instance, as that's where the goodness lies, hence the Oxo cube to restore those juices.

He discovered all the secrets of what makes crops grow (basically, if a single vital mineral is lacking in the soil, then it doesn't matter how much of everything else you have - nothing will grow).

Without his research there'd be none of the reliable crop yields we now take for granted.

I don't know what he would have thought of Dunkirk though.

Think I will give it a Miss ,Slip

@tobermory -- Read 2 articles in The Guardian on this film.

First one headline 'With Dunkirk has Nolan proven he is as great as Kubrick?' Which is like arguing Jordan Henderson has reached the level of Hagi .

The other article totally demolished the movie , laughing that the Luftwaffe only had 7 planes etc

That article really seemed to be complaining that Nolan had not made a completely different film -- possibly even the BBC Dunkirk drama-doc with Benedict Cumberbatch which has been rushed out on DVD. If the Luftwaffe had only seven planes, we had only three Spitfires. Nolan has chosen three stories, with three main characters. To complain that in real life there was lots of other stuff going on misses the point.

And the complaint about not enough soldiers being on the beach is misguided -- a better point is how congested with ships the Channel was.

The irony of Dunkirk that Nolan missed is that it worked because we did what the Germans are stereotypically supposed to be good at. British planning and efficiency won the day and the Nazis were a shambles.

The Guardian's critical article is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/jul/26/bloodless-boring-empty-christopher-nolan-dunkirk-left-me-cold

A blog about historical accuracy (and where it is lacking) in the film is here:
http://www.griffonmerlin.com/2017/07/19/dunkirk-does-historical-accuracy-matter/

Not necessarily a shambles on the part of the Germans. Their armoured columns had already suffered casualties pushing the BEF back to the coast, there was heavy rain which made mechanized forces less effective and there was still the small matter of preserving strength in order to conquer the rest of France. They weren't to know at that point that so much of the French army was just going to melt away in a drunken shambles, to the extent that many French towns welcomed the Germans as a means of restoring order.

And far too many in the French establishment looked on Dunkirk as a political opportunity: the British, they said, had run away, leaving the French to their fate. So here was a chance to fill the vacuum under a new, German-organized system, with the British as the now irrelevant, untrustworthy neighbour across the Channel, desperate to negotiate peace terms. A sort of beta-version of the European Union, if you like.

But yes, there were a lot of German failings. Responsibility for dealing with the situation at Dunkirk was handed over to the Luftwaffe, to a large extent because the Luftwaffe had been created under the Nazis, unlike the army, which obviously pre-dated them. This looked like a good opportunity to give the newsreels a Nazi Party victory.

And it's also been suggested that while a seafaring nation such as ourselves would look on a beach as an exit door, to a Continental people it looked like the end of the world. The evacuation was simply not foreseeable to a German mind.

Yeah and we know what sort of Judge you are Grant.