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Dunkirk Review

Anyone who has followed me for a while knows I'm not exactly a big fan of Christopher Nolan, and yet I was pretty interested in his new film, Dunkirk. I'm not sure why since Nolan has a track record of failing to live up to the hype, such as with Interstellar.  Interstellar got me super psyched since it was such a cool concept and I'm a space geek, but the movie itself is just straight up laughable when it isn't boring as hell.  So you'd think I would've learned by now.

I guess it's just because Dunkirk is about one of history's greatest turning points. 300,000 mostly British soldiers stranded on a beach with the full might of the Nazi war machine closing in on them. The fate of the entire Western world hinged on whether or not they could cross a body of water so small they could practically see home from the shore. Their saviors? Ordinary British civilians who got in their little boats and sailed across the channel to rescue their countrymen, going back and forth for a week just to get all those guys out. What a fantastic story to tell, and one we really haven't seen done before on the big screen.

You would think having such a stirring historical event as the basis for this movie would make Nolan's job easy, but as with many of his movies that get all the hype, in the end he just couldn't deliver. Let's talk about why Dunkirk unfortunately doesn't measure up:



And if you'd like more on Dunkirk, check out this week's episode of The Flyby, the weekly podcast that I co-host with Sarjex, wherein Ed Morrissey joins me to talk about where this movie succeeds and where this movie fails.


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