Reply To: Interesting article about war films

[limburger 21711xp 2]

I think that the closer you are to a specific subject the more annoying any mistakes and ignorance of source material is going to be (to say nothing of the blatant twisting of facts).

Dunkirk definitely was weird, because despite the fact that I know nothing of the actual events the beaches felt empty.
It also didn’t help that the movie itself showed the events from several different points of view out of order. Such things can add to the drama, but (IMHO) in this movie they made it needlessly complicated.

I think another part of the problem for war movies is that they’re also used as propaganda material.
There’s nothing better than seeing ‘our side’ beat the designated bad guys, especially if you casually ignore the few good things the ‘bad’ guys did. How else are you going to get the army to cooperate ?

OTOH … these things are movies and not documentaries. Given how ‘documentaries’ on History Channel and National Geographic try to play with tension and overly dramatic cliff hangers before commercial breaks it is more annoying than when movies do it.