Recently, I went to see the film “Dunkirk” at the cinema. I had seen trailers for it and they looked very intense and interesting, but I wasn’t very familiar with the events that the film was based on, so I did some research online.
The film is set during World War 2 and is about the evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in May 1940. Germany had advanced into France and Allied troops were trapped, so British and French forces sent air, ground and naval support to help cover and slowly evacuate soldiers. Naval vessels and hundreds of civilian vessels were used to evacuate troops and at the end of the mission approximately 330,000 Allied soldiers were safely evacuated.
The film follows various different characters from different backgrounds who all play a part in the evacuation, whether it’s the soldiers being evacuated, civilians who are helping during the evacuation or the pilots providing air support. You get to see what the event was like from different people’s perspectives, but they all have something in common – they are in intense situations. If I had to describe the film in one word, I would say it’s intense. People are constantly at risk of dying and the film does a really good job of making you feel stressed out through its music and ambience. Lots of people die and the situation can look very bleak for the characters a lot of the time. The Dunkirk evacuation was by no means pleasant, but the film does a really good job of showing you just how traumatic and horrific it really was. By the end of the film, I felt like I understood the situation much better than I would have by just reading about it.
