Second hand report: My son went to see Dunkirk yesterday and gave it his highest compliment: "I would have paid to see that!". Which he did of course but often regrets..... sometimes he claims a movie was good enough to watch and maybe even good enough to pay for but not $12 in US dollars.
I suspect most here, being old as most of us are, know the story well enough. I think that makes the movie even better because you know how it ends when you walk into the theater so it has to be better by at leas 15% than any 'surprise' movie. For those are not familiar with this event, I guess I would say it was certainly not a victory for the British but through sheer determination and tenacity not only by their armed forces but their entire population, they certainly prevented it from being the defeat and disaster it surely seemed to be and almost did become. And perhaps, given the next few years and all that followed and was allowed to happen because of this specific event, maybe it was a victory, perhaps even the first spark in a chain of events that would become an amazing victory.
The event became the cause of one of Winnie's (Winston Churchill, the politician named after Mikey's dog.....
) most motivating and famous speeches, one of three fantastic speeches given in a roughly one- month period, one of the most intense in British history IMO, since he had become Prime Minister. The first was the "Blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech, followed by the "Wh shall fight on the beaches" speech, perhaps my personal favorite considering the time and circumstances in which it was given, and this one about Dunkirk that ends with....
"What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over ... the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour."
This film Dunkirk is about what may well have been their finest hour.
By the way, it seems to be an all- British production, just like the event that it depicts; written and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring (among many others of course) Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy.... hey, it even has an Attenborough (yep, his grandson) in it.
Aw hell, now I want to go see it... and I do not go to movie theaters!
Brian