• @CWO:

    @taamvan:

    it is the popular, majority, mainstream view that the most popular conspiracy theories are correct

    Conspiracy theories have majority mainstream acceptance?

    “Hands up, don’t shoot”.

    Not bringing up politics, but this was proven to be completely false but people believe it anyway.

    The movie was ok, but it was no “Saving Private Ryan”.

    As far as historical stuff goes I thought it was excellent.  I think they threw out too many German bombers and dive bombers escort w/o escort, but other than that it was great.  I exceptionally liked the scream of the Stukas.  That had to scare the hell out of people.  Made me wonder, how did the dive bombers who were right on top of these things not go deaf?  There are 2 things I would have added to the movie that  they left out though.  1.  They should have shown all the discarded equipment on the roads, and made a bigger point of how when they got back to England all their weapons had been left behind.  2.  Stopping the French from getting on the boats.  While it was mentioned they didn’t get into the hostility that took place between England and France over the policy, and why they changed it.  I would also have liked to have heard somewhere from some French guy the saying at the time “England is willing to fight to the last Frenchmen”.

    My biggest problem with the movie is that the characters were too one dimensional.  You lost track of who was who, and didn’t really care when someone died because they all came across as “soldier X”.  (other than that kid on the boat who was killed by the guy with shell shock, that sucked).


  • @Zooey72:

    2.  Stopping the French from getting on the boats.  While it was mentioned they didn’t get into the hostility that took place between England and France over the policy, and why they changed it.  I would also have liked to have heard somewhere from some French guy the saying at the time “England is willing to fight to the last Frenchmen”.

    Ironically, it might not have made much difference in the end because most of the French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk – over 100,000, which is not a trivial figure and which represents about one-third of the total numbers evacuated – were shipped back to France to re-join the fight against the German forces advancing into France…with the result that they very soon ended up in German hands as POWs when France fell.  On a similar note, I think that during the Battle of France Churchill had been urging the French government to allow Britian to take charge of the German POWs that France was holding and ship them off to Canada, where they’d remain in Allied custody even if France fell.  The French government refused (perhaps because this would have meant conceding that France might fall, which in fairness would have been a distasteful prospect to admit), and these German POWs ended up being liberated by their comrades-in-arms when France did indeed fall.

    That line about England fighting to the last drop of French blood, incidentally, can be heard in Frank Capra’s “The Battle of France” chapter of the “Why We Fight” series, as a German loudspeaker broadcast to the French across the Maginot Line during the Phony War.  It’s also used in the WWII-era Bogart movie “Passage to Marseilles”, where English actor Claude Rains (playing a Frenchman once again, as he did in Casablanca) dryly speculates that the line was “invented in the office of Doctor Goebbels.”

  • Customizer

    In 50 years we will have no history. Everything that isn’t PC will be expunged from the record, street names and statues will be erased and replaced, perhaps even the remains of the dead will be exhumed and incinerated if they don’t pass the test. The future is inverted fascism, just as Orwell predicted.


  • I just saw the movie and it was ok for me. I agree with most in above posts. I needed to see more planes and some German pilot talk and some German generals giving some kind of tactical orders and maybe a Hitler scene with some generals.
    I did love the planes when they flew by or over.


  • One our our local newspapers had an article about the Dunkirk movie this weekend, and I cringed when I read the header paragraph which said that Nolan’s film looks back at “this forgotten event.”  Groan.  And to make matters worse, there’s a paragraph near the end of the article which says that the Dunkirk evacuation “is celebrated in Britain,” which would be nonsensical if the evacuation really was a forgotten event.  An earlier paragraph similarly fails to sell convincingly the case for amnesia when it says that the event is “barely mentioned in French history textbooks,”  which isn’t quite the same as saying that nobody remembers it at all.  I couldn’t help wondering if the “forgotten event” characterization was really a case of the author of the article indirectly admitting that he’d never heard of Dunkirk.


  • Just think. Goering told Hitler " my Luftwaffe will destroy them on the beaches"

    what did we get … well like 2 He-111 and 5 Me-109, and 3 JU-87

    some Luftwaffe… freaking cheepos…it was like one plane every 15 minutes, should have been a sky full of planes


  • A good comparison would be “enemy at the gates”. A few Ju87’s here and then attacking the crossing TT’s in the Volga.
    Looks like according to the situation in late 42.

    In Dunkirk there should be more. Rolling waves over waves plaster the beachhead with bombs and MG-fire.

    I haven’t seen the movie yet, but listening to you guys makes me wonder.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    If it’s realism you were looking for - I wouldn’t be a big fan of the “fighter scenes”

    Shooting down 5 planes made you an ACE fighter pilot; and whilst it wasn’t unheard of to become an ACE in a day, it certainly wasn’t common.

    Further… Tom Hardy’s spitfire never seems to run out of ammunition, when in fact, spitfires only had a matter of seconds of ammuntion (40 to 60 seconds continuous fire?  I am sure someone here can confirm?).

    THAT SAID.

    Don’t look at Dunkirk as a War Movie.  It’s a much better HORROR Film.  You basically never see the Germans,  the tension is extremely thick, and you truly get the sense of fear of desperation the allied soldiers felt; and the doom and gloom of waiting on a ship that will likely sink.

    Where I became convinced it was a horror film, was with the soldiers who hid on the boat that was beached.  and when the bullets start flying, they start turning on each other.  No one knows who the other can trust!

    It reminded me alot of Das Boot…


  • Shooting down 5 planes made you an ACE fighter pilot; and whilst it wasn’t unheard of to become an ACE in a day, it certainly wasn’t common.

    Further… Tom Hardy’s spitfire never seems to run out of ammunition, when in fact, spitfires only had a matter of seconds of ammuntion (40 to 60 seconds continuous fire?  I am sure someone here can confirm?).

    This is no different than that American victory at one Pearl Harbor movie, where the cook shoots down 300 Japanese planes and sinks 6 carriers and dies from stepping on a milk cartoon followed by Tokyo getting totally destroyed by 15 bombs and surrendering.

  • '17 '16 '15 '14 '12

    The movie celebrates what Britain did.

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