labingi

I saw Dunkirk yesterday and highly recommend it. It's very good across the board, gripping, gritty, and realistic. I have only two small quibbles: it was hard to hear the dialogue over the music and bombings. (My hearing is getting progressively worse, but my partner agreed.) The non-linear storytelling sometimes worked for me and sometimes was just a bit confusing. It didn't seem like a story that really needed non-linear storytelling to get the point across. Otherwise, it's an utterly fantastic look at the terrors of war and the courage of people pulling together in crisis. (Oddly, it made me think, "Maybe we can survive climate change.")

The film I am most reminded of is Grave of the Fireflies, though Dunkirk is about soldiers (mainly), not civilians; takes place over a day or so rather than months; and is not animated. It is, however, a story about the horrors of war with virtually no reference to the politics of war. The enemy is nothing but an implacable force raining down fiery hell. The whole story is from one side's perspective, but that's okay because that perspective is not used to project anything onto the other side; it's really just all about surviving hell and making us ponder why we put ourselves and fellow people into situations like this.