Dunkirk: Long & tedious war

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D’Arcy

Rated: 4/10

War films have been Hollywood’s staple forever. This one, on a rescue mission by civilian boats and ferries of thousands of British and French soldiers being slaughtered by the enemy at Dunkirk, what with Churchill wanting to save the big ships for future assaults, is slow but engaging in parts.

The landscape of the stark land hugging a wild frothy sea in a deserted, hungry and dry region has been captured beautifully by the director. Even the slaughtering of these helpless soldiers with scary and frequent aerial raids splashes genuine discomfort among the viewers. But the proceedings are too static, stuck up and linear to give avid sequencing to the film.

The slaughter, for example, goes on and on as do the futile efforts of the soldiers to save themselves. The rescue yacht run by an old man who has lost his elder son to war, has its own side story to tell, what with a soldier killing a young boy in his determination to change the course of the yacht — away from the blood and gore of the battle scene where he does not want to go.

But despite all this and much more, the film lacks soul and drags as a much too long one from Hollywood.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 23 July, 2017