I’m going to pass on seeing this. I’m really tired of Hollywood’s “reimaging” historical narratives to meet their politically correct agenda. From the WSJ:
On May 28, 1940, Winston Churchill held a meeting of his government’s ministers. “I described the course of events and showed them plainly where we were, and all that was in the balance,” Churchill later wrote. “Then I said quite casually . . .: ‘Of course, whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.’ . . . I was sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in. . . . There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end.”
“Dunkirk,” opening in theaters Friday, is noteworthy in many respects. Not least for its creator’s decision—on the interesting ground that it would make things clearer for audiences—to avoid any appearance of Churchill. Of, that is, the newly appointed prime minister central to this story: the voice of that embattled Britain whose citizens, answering their government’s call, set out to rescue its army, stranded on the beaches of northern France in May of 1940.
Director Christopher Nolan, whose credits include “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” has said he wanted to avoid making a film “not relevant to today’s audiences” and that he didn’t want to get them bogged down in “politics.”
This says more than Mr. Nolan intended about his estimate of today’s moviegoers—whose capacities, he fears, would not be equal to a film involving images of a historic figure. There were other worries. Mr. Nolan didn’t want to make a film that could be seen as old-fashioned, he informed his interviewer. It appears further that the director wanted to avoid taxing today’s film audiences with any specifics about the foe that had the British Expeditionary Force fighting for its life on those beaches.
“We don’t have generals in rooms pushing things around on maps,” Mr. Nolan explained. “We don’t see Churchill. We barely glimpse the enemy.” All true. Though there are quite a number of enemy planes, bombers smashing the troops on the beach. The bare glimpse Mr. Nolan mentions is of the insignia identifying the nation to which those planes belong. Who could it be?
On the other hand, the markings on the British fighters engaging the enemy in dogfights loom large and clear. As do the reasons for all of the above. For, as Mr. Nolan has told us, he considers Dunkirk “a universal story . . . about communal heroism.” Which explains why this is—despite its impressive cinematography, its moving portrait of suffering troops and their rescuers—a Dunkirk flattened out, disconnected from the spirit of its time, from any sense even of the particular mighty enemy with which England was at war.
When an event in history has become, in the mind of a writer, “universal” it’s a tip-off—the warning bell that we’re about to lose most of the important facts of that history, and that the story-telling will be a special kind—a sort that obscures all specifics that run counter to the noble vision of the universalist.