Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017)

Its not if you know history. Its looks "reasonable" if you are primed to think that German military officers are automatically "Nazi". Which type of person thinks in that way? A bigot. So yes, you are a bigot if you think its absurd to make a movie featuring German generals as people and not cartoon villains as Hollywood usually does these days.

Anyway, from interacting with you I cannot help myself but arrive at the conclusion that indeed I do think that you are a bigot. You think its ok to be prejudiced against non-English speakers and defend people who are bigots, while showing prejudice regularly while making arrogant assumptions about people who you know nothing about (such as Manstein or fans of a TV show such as K-On!, or making fun of people who are not fluent English speakers such as Resopameric) while showing no empathy for people who are not of your ethnic background.

Thats very ignorant. The US had many more German veterans than Brazil had. I only recall one Nazi that lived in Brazil for a while, Mengele.

Argentina is the infamous country by the way since they were sympathetic to Germany during the war as they bet on them winning. Brazil and Argentina are different countries by the way, I know Americans often confuse the two countries since keeping track of foreign countries is hard for Americans. Sexy Celebrity even though we speak Spanish...

While Brazil bet on the Allies so Brazil sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Europe to help the other Allies. My grandfather was earmarked to go to Europe as an Allied soldier but the war was over before he could go.

I like history, it was my top grade in the college entrance exam, so knowing history I can notice things like ethnocentrism regarding Hollywood movies.

If you do not want to be called a bigot try not acting like a bigot. I know its very hard for you given your cultural environment and conservative republican American background but I guess the safe option for you would be to not interact with people with different ethnic background from yours, like me. Because its natural that you will be regarded as a bigot if you act in that way with people who do not share your ethnic background.

Or you can try to start thinking about non-native English speakers as people. Its hard for you but if you stop yourself from dehumanizing non-native English speakers you will not be on the receiving end of people who react to bigotry.

Its your choice.

Note that you have now diluted the word "bigot" down to the point where someone can be one for not knowing enough history.

You continue to misstate the claim: it's not "Germany military officers," it's a German military commander. And it's a commander convicted of war crimes. Also, as I just pointed out, your initial claim is that I said it just "because he was German." You repeated that several times, but it's demonstrably false.

And the only thing you have to be "primed" to think to form the conclusion I did is that people convicted at Nuremberg are either Nazis, or sufficiently indifferent or sympathetic to their cause as to warrant being grouped in with them. And that, I should note, is primarily a philosophical/moral question, not a factual/historical one.

Do you see what you did here? You just flipped the burden of proof. I didn't say it was absurd to make it. I said it wasn't absurd not to.

It's very telling that you can't seem to make an argument without blatantly misrepresenting the other side.

Exactly. Culture-wide generalizations usually are. This is obvious to you when the generalization is about your own culture, but you conveniently forget this when you find it useful to generalize about others.

Yet another bait-and-switch. The relevant metric is not "veterans," it's war criminals. The U.S. is literally still tracking down Nazi war criminals. Brazil took in thousands of them.

Irrelevant. Infamy is not either-or, and the topic is whether someone can make a cultural assumption about your interest and sympathies based on Brazil taking in German war criminals; the fact that it took in fewer than Argentina has no bearing on that point.

This is precisely what I've been talking about: rather than use knowledge to take sound positions and make sound arguments, you attempt to use it to avoid having to. Knowledge (particularly selective or distorted knowledge) should be a source to be drawn from, not an imprimatur you can use to be mindlessly deferred to.

Also, this, right here, is the whole problem in a nutshell:

"...stop yourself from dehumanizing..."
"...given your cultural environment and conservative republican American background"

This is you doing exactly the thing you're complaining about. You literally warn against cultural generalizations and stereotypes in one paragraph, and then engage in both in the very next. So let's apply your own logic to your own statements, with just one word replacement:

You think its ok to be prejudiced against Americans ... while showing prejudice regularly while making arrogant assumptions about people who you know nothing about.

According to your own logic, you are a bigot.

I dont even know what this thread is about anymore, Guapo, but here you go

http://www.history.com/news/how-sout...e-a-nazi-haven

What?

Urmmm, you're coming across as a bigot there.

Not to mention here


I dont know where on earth you're pulling all of this stuff out of. Seems to me you might be projecting, especially considering your generalised comment about being so hard for an american because of his cultural environment. You know what they say about pots and kettles.

Back to Dunkirk, re: the sound complaint above, is it the old volume range trend or just failing generally?

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I do partly agree with Guaporense in that Hollywood has been guilty of portraying false images of both Germany and their opposition in the last few decades. If you look back at the films which came out around the time of the war, they were a lot more balanced than more recent war films, probably because they were made in a period of deep existential crisis, with filmmakers of all countries collectively trying to make sense of what was happening across the globe. Nowadays it's less about reflectivity and more about recalling which is where distortions can creep in. But this has less to do with Hollywood itself and more to do with the fact that history always has a funny way of glorifying the victors and denigrating the losers to remember a completely distorted interpretation of reality. The fact that Churchill is remembered as a heroic figure by most British citizens speaks volumes to me and keep in mind, I myself am a British citizen.

Churchill was responsible for one of the greatest crimes against humanity when he allowed the Bengal famine to take place in India, the unspoken Holocaust which took the lives of around 4 million Indians. Moreover not only did he allow this to happen, he refused to react to it, denying aid from both Canada and USA (with both countries offering 100,000 tons of rice. How many lives could've been saved with this food?) Not to mention his repeated bombing campaigns in Iraq and later (after the war had ended) in Germany which took the lives of several innocent civilians. His repeated use of poisonous gas in Syria to kill off what he called "uncivilised tribes" and his involvement in the India-Pakistan partition, perhaps one of greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Was he really any different from Hitler? I suppose it takes one monster to defeat another. To be honest, no one comes out well from WW2 but Hitler, Churchill and Stalin really take it to a whole new level of repugnance.

But with that being said, I do not agree with his argument that Nolan should've made a film on something else or that he's made a film only for the British. Firstly, Dunkirk was a significant "victory" not just for the British but all of Britain's allies and it was an important event during WW2. And more importantly it's not up to you to decide what subject a particular filmmaker should tackle. If you don't like what the film's about, just don't watch it but don't expect Nolan to make the sort of film that you find interesting. He'll dedicate his time and effort to what he's passionate about and that may not necessarily agree with your interests.

As for the film itself, I think it's quite impressive. It's not some sort of grand philosophical statement on war but rather an attempt at recreating the atmosphere of world war 2 and depicting the frailties of individual soldiers in the grand scheme of things. I did not like the way it ended, in a sort of triumphantly patriotic note, which needlessly moves the film into political hot water (and is now destined to have BREXIT advocates masturbating to it for time immemorial) and shifts the focus from what the film was really about. It's not a masterpiece, and claims about it being one of the greatest war films ever made and largely unfounded but for the most part, Nolan is operating at a very high level of craftsmanship here. It's one of the year's best films so far.

Agreed. There's a kernel of a reasonable argument, it's just buried in a mountain of risible, reflexive accusations and obvious overstatements. Merely assuming this film is an example of the same, sight unseen, without any firsthand knowledge, is exactly the kind of thinking that's ostensibly being criticized.

Aye. There are any number of angles from which to assert distortions or criticize depictions that don't require simplistic accusations, but I suppose moral outrage is easier than grappling with the complicated realities of how other people actually think. Gotta say, though, that's it's pretty amazing someone could criticize films for a lack of nuance or self-awareness, and then exhibit even less by suggesting it's because of bigotry.

Indeed. Whatever the merits of the arguments, they clearly have no real relationship to Nolan or Dunkirk; the film's release is simply being used as an excuse to bring them up. Such is the way of all zealots: everything ultimately reminds them of the thing they already wanted to talk about.

Yes, even the literature on WW2 today is much more distorted than before.

I don't think Churchill was on the same level as Hitler or Stalin, those two were on a league of their own in terms of monstrosity, its just that he wasn't perfectly moral either.

Also:

Strategically it was irrelevant whether the UK retrieved 300,000 men or not in 1940.

The Allies mobilized 70 million men in WW2, the USSR alone mobilized 35 million soldiers and lost 29 million soldiers in battle, France mobilized 6 million and lost all 6 million in 42 days. While Germany mobilized 18 million soldiers and lost 11 million in battle.

Also, considering the UK didn't use it's manpower directly in the Eastern front from 1941-1943, where the decisive battles of the war took place, means that those 300,000 men also didn't even help the allies in winning the war since they stayed holed up in the UK until the later years of the war, when Germany had already lost the war strategically (after losing Kursk in mid 1943 all German commanders agreed that the war was lost, some even considered the war lost in late 1941 when the attack on Moscow failed, which was what caused a heart attack in the supreme commander of the German armed forces, Walther von Brauchitsch).

The reason was the Germany lacked the manpower to fight a long war of attrition and so they lost the war when they couldn't win it with an overwhelmingly aggressive offensive like they did in 1940 and tried to do in 1941 against the USSR. After the offensive on the USSR failed in November 1941, the allies had effectively won WW2 because the war became purely manpower attrition and they had several times the manpower the German army had. Since the allies didn't lack manpower retrieving or not those 0.34 million men didn't matter in the end.

It's true that I have been overreacting. I think I am too stressed out about by job that I get aggressive reactions about anything these days.

I still think that it's a rather ethnocentric theme for a movie, but well, he is a UK's director and if it's important for the UK's history (even though it wasn't strategically decisive, it was important for "emotional support" to retrieve manpower, I guess), so let him glorify it.

So Germany "lost" the war before Pearl Harbor?

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Of course. The US never played a decisive role in WW2.

The Soviet Union won the war and inflicted 90% of the total German dead, winning all the decisive battles. Actually, being the only Allied country present in the decisive battles: Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk. Some historians even argue that the effort of all other Allied countries combined was irrelevant for the outcome.

Substantial number of US, UK and other non-USSR troops only arrived in Europe in late 1944, well after the war was strategically won by Stalin's armies.

Even in 1945, the size of all other Allied armies in Europe was 100 divisions compared to 265 divisions for Stalin's armies. A British study called Operation Unthinkable showed that if the other Allies declared war on Stalin they would be effectively giving the whole of continental Europe to the communists.

While the most important US's role in WW2 was to basically help Stalin through logistical supply through lend-lease. Which they were doing before the formal declaration of war by Germany.

Therefore, without Pearl Harbor and the US's involvement WW2 would have ended with Stalin conquering all of Continental Europe up to the border with Spain.

Are you actually interested in discussing the movie, Guapo?

But it never happened. It's just a movie. Tom Hardy could never have been a fighter pilot during WWII. If he had, how do you explain Bane? And then Legend and Fury Road? Next you're going to tell me the DeLorean is a real car. Great Scott!

This guy is a gem.

Here's a Slate article on the subject.

Does It Really Matter How You See Dunkirk?

A real treasure

I guess it was just my expectations. I saw the extended trailer in IMAX and the audio was flipping amazing. I am guessing maybe the theater toned it down due to complaints, but who expects an "on scene" war movie (or "movie during war" for those that say this is not a war movie) to not be loud?

Again I enjoyed it, but really wanted to be immersed more into it.

Amazing the stuff this guy comes out with.

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Huh? He's completely correct. Churchill was awful. And even if you don't believe that yourself he certainly wasn't perfectly moral.

You post comments simply to be incendiary.

You know nothing of my intentions. I was reacting to you disagreeing with Guap saying Churchill wasn't perfectly moral, Guap even disagreed with Nameless Paladin wondering if Churchill was much better than Hitler and you said nothing to him.

So you're telling me Churchill was perfectly moral?