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“...I did see Dunkirk, and thought it was atrociously done, both artistically and historically...”[YogicCowboy, post 33]

I read someplace that in making Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan & crew deliberately avoided a “top-down” viewpoint: it might be the approach taken by academic historians, analysts, and newsies, but it’s inauthentic to actual battlefield experience, especially that of junior enlisted folks. To the lowly private soldier or seaman no-stripe, nothing about combat makes sense, and they rarely see events in a larger context; they just do their duties, try to contain their own confusion and fear, and hope they get through it alive. Not all succeed at every point.

To that end, Nolan did not use very many big-name actors or concealed them (Michael Caine performed voice work for some of the RAF radio-call sequences, but his face never appears). In the mad scramble, I imagine a good many participants got shoved here and there in ways that made little sense, often finding themselves in small groups of utter strangers. You’ll note that few characters were mentioned by name.

When it comes to historical accuracy, no film on war can hope to convey the complete experience: if one did, moviegoers would be throwing up in their seats, stunned and deafened, or fleeing the cinema in terror. Missing also has been a sense of scale: by the time WW2 rolled around, battlefields were strangely empty. Foot troops in particular were fired on by adversaries they never saw, and frequently returned fire without first seeing an identifiable target. Any director who brought that to the silver screen would lose the audience.

My understanding of prevailing weather in the area in early June 1940 is that there was a thick low overcast, which prevented the Luftwaffe from hitting the fleeing BEF and the evacuation ships to any serious degree. Pretty prosaic, and moreover it would not have worked onscreen - where good weather and long-sighted vistas provided a backdrop for the film that was at once breathtakingly beautiful and somber, as if pointing out the puny scale of human squabbles.

I came away from viewing Dunkirk with a renewed appreciation for British participation in the conflict: not marked by boldness nor especially canny battlefield leadership, but a sense of muddling trough, of inglorious slogging, a persistence that ultimately paid off.