Just STICK to the facts

Christopher Nolan’s new film Dunkirk was released last week, and the war picture is getting the director the best reviews of his whole career.

The film tells the epic tale of the chaotic evacuation of British and French Allied troops from northern France in 1940.

As you’ll no doubt be aware, it’s a very famous event and like anything that actually happened, it has certain facts associated with it. But some of those facts have made people sad.

The reviewer from USA Today, for example. While Brian Truitt liked the film, he bemoaned the lack of diversity.

He said: “The fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color [sic] may rub some the wrong way,” That’ll be the lack of women in a film about the evacuation of British and French troops in 1940.

So, our three options are:

1. He doesn’t know the evacuation of Dunkirk was a real thing that happened

2. He knows that it is real but would have preferred that women were among those slaughtered because equality 3. He knows that it’s real, but doesn’t care, because rewriting history is an important aspect of virtue signaling and “social justice”.

I’m going for the third option: this is virtue-signalling on a Biblical level.

The people trapped at Dunkirk were young, white males. Saving those young, white males were other white males. Trying to kill those young, white males were other white males.

Facts like these are unpopular among some segments of society. Unfortunately, statements like Truitt’s are not uncommon. Diversity for diversity’s sake is very popular in Hollywood these days.

Most people don’t care all that much about it, but either pretend they do, or keep their mouths shut, for the sake of a quiet life. Because the people that do care, ‘really’ care, and castigate those who don’t share their worldview. And that’s a big problem when it comes to reviews, because reviewers that push their own personal agendas over the art they’re critiquing, run the risk of lying to their audiences. Take last summer’s Ghostbusters film. I’ve written before about the drama surrounding the casting of four women as the four lead Ghostbusters, but once the film came out, it should have been judged on its own merits.

But it was rare to find a truly objective review.

A large number of writers gave Ghostbusters a positive review despite the bad writing, bad acting and poor effects. These reviewers felt the “message” of four female leads meant the film was worthy of praise, no matter how bad the product was. A smaller – but no less deceitful – group was determined to treat the film like it was secret footage from inside an animal testing facility. Even if the film was actually alright, they hated its revisionist nature and would never have given it a fair crack. In the case of Dunkirk, it’s refreshing to see how much stick this guy has taken from the general public. Maybe he’ll figure out why they’re mocking him, but I doubt it, opinions like his are all too prevalent in the world of journalism. There aren’t enough women in Dunkirk. There aren’t enough kangaroos in Titanic. And don’t get me started about the disgusting lack of robots in Malcolm X. Worst of all though – and no amount of hashtaggery will fix this – these days, there aren’t enough journalists in journalism.

A scene from Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk