Well, the movie is about entirely fictional characters with separate fictional stories set within a real event, not a dramatization of individual real life stories of the event. That's the end point, Dunkirk was an evacuation of 400,000 troops. It was not a small, well researched event where you can narrow down the heroes to less than a dozen people.
In contrast, I can understand the controversy around Stonewall because the fictional character was shown as the instigator of the real life event, and Birth of the Dragon because it sets up a fictional white protagonist viewing a confrontation between two real life Asian martial art legends.
Alright I'm just going to repost this again because someone here seems to have not read it on the last page.
Essentially, the legitimate grievance that many South Asian audiences felt - which I also actually shared in spite of the fact that I don't share their ethnicity - is how the production clearly had Shown Their Work by including Arabs and Africans among the French troops, yet failed to also include Indians or possibly Nepalese Gurkhas (they were organized as part of "Indian" units) among the British - even though the only effort involved would be to simply hire a dozen or so Indians and dress them up in simple-to-reproduce period uniforms.
Case in point, the Indian extras who appear at 0:37 in this trailer for Wonder Woman.
People aren't throwing fits because Indians weren't portrayed as being involved in the Battle of Dunkirk. People are throwing fits because the production of one of the most ambitious historical films with a gargantuan budget in the past few years seemingly couldn't be arsed to employ a couple of Indians to be in non-speaking background roles, while they were clearly arsed into getting a handful of Arabs and Africans on the screen.
There's just something embarrassing when a superhero flick does more to showcase the diversity within the British Empire's military than an actual historical drama film.
I agree, such an extreme minority really shouldn't factor into the movie.
I mean people from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Poland were in the D-Day invasion on the allies side but you don't see them in any D-Day movie cause they were such a minority it didn't really factor into telling the movie.
It's more about the Indian minority in the UK, who wish to be represented in the national story. And activists who are inclined to dislike any war movie that is not Platoon or something like that for being "jingoistic". These people hates Saving Private Ryan for the same reason, and with Brexit, their on heightened alert. The only acceptable movie in their eyes would have shown the Tommies going on racist rants, abusing everyone, being cowards, and then going on to torment their wives and children due to their own reprised bitterness. The child of course goes on to write for the Guardian and expose the whole charade of the "Dunkirk myth" and is thus the hero of the movie.
Edit: Oh and Churchill has to literally eat a baby. Preferably while ranting about how much he hates Hindu's and wondering why Gandi hasn't starved to death yet.
edited 5th Aug '17 9:05:49 AM by JackOLantern1337
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.![]()
Hollywood Reporter: 'Dunkirk' Sparks Debate in India Over Failure to Show Soldiers From the Country
C'mon Jacky, this is a new low for you. Nobody is demanding that the entire film be about an Indian company at Dunkirk. The only thing people are asking for is to see at least one non-speaking extra in a crowd scene like the Indians at the train station in Wonder Woman.
There was a scene when Bolton is examining the troops on the beach. The camera pans closely over British and French soldiers sleeping, eating, chatting, and looking at the camera with a thousand-yard stare. Some of the French soldiers are clearly dark-skinned colonial troops. That would have been the moment to have a single member of the Royal Indian Service Corps pop up on screen.
__
To give another example of the successful use of a Token Minority extra, Fury
- which depicted the last months of the World War II in Germany - included an East Asian US Army soldier appearing at one point with a single line of dialogue. Many casual viewers assumed that he representing the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team which did fight in Europe. However, more history savvy viewers immediately realized that the 442nd was sent to Italy and not Germany. Thus, said Asian soldier was likely to be one of the thousands of Chinese-Americans
who served - unlike their Japanese, Korean, or Filipino counterparts - in non-segregated units.
The Asian soldier appears on the far right of the infantry squad at 0:28, stating that "G-2 wants a prisoner to question".
Who said anything about the movie being about Indians? The straw man I presented for the sake of comedy merely involved making the British soldiers look bad and as a source for "Guardianista", whining. I actually think wouldn't have been to much to give Indian soldiers a cameo. But that's not the real reason certain types, as opposed to the Indian community, are pissed at the movie. The sheer venom of some of the attacks proves it.
Edit: Oh and I actually didn't know about the Chinese Americans in WW 2. You learn something new everyday.
Edit 2: And as to Polk's point about those old movies that should have had representation, the problem is that nobody is making movies about those incidents anymore. For the most part their forgotten, whereas Dunkirk is fairly well known in America, and a pivotal event in British history.
edited 5th Aug '17 2:51:03 PM by JackOLantern1337
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.We read it, we just didn't agree with you.
You can post a video from Wonder Woman but the fact is that there weren't Indians at Dunkirk. Multicultural Britain in 2017 is different from Britain of 1940 and Britain of 1940 was Whitey Whiterson McWhiteface. That's just the way it was. Indians fought in North Africa and Burma and Malaya. Indians were surrendered at Singapore by their disgraceful coward of a commander...
...actually, that's a fun idea, someone could make a movie called Singapore, which would be Dunkirk with a Downer Ending in which no one gets away...
...but anyway, Indians fought for King George VI in lots of places but 1940 France and Belgium was not one of those places. I'm really at a loss to understand this desire for Token Minority and Black Vikings and the willingness to criticize Christopher Nolan for not making his movie less accurate and more ahistorical.
edited 5th Aug '17 5:52:33 PM by jamespolk
Would "0.2%" be better? The reason that Dunkirk doesn't give face time to the Indian contribution to the battle of France and Operation Dynamo was that, well, there was no Indian contribution to these things.
Where were the Welsh? Must have been thousands of them. Is there a righteously angry newspaper article about how the Welsh contribution to the British war effort is ignored?
Only article I've found on the Welsh and this movie is this article about this guy
, who liked the movie. All the other articles date back to 2010.
If the Welsh don't feel left out of the film but Indians do, well, squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I just realised that the three storylines are literally Land, Sea, Sky.
And they all culminate with a shot of a burning Spitfire.
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.Re: Dunkirk and Indian soldiers. This seems like a manufactured controversy. There were barely any Indian soldiers on Dunkirk, period. Now, as an Indian-American, I'd love to see more WWII films featuring Kiplings Finest, but complaining that every WWII film about the UK doesn't have a token Indian or a shoehorned message about Imperialism is dumb, and it's borne out of a post-colonial fanaticism on India's part that Britain is the devil, rather than any real reverence for history.
There are absolutely great opportunities for Indians to be featured, such as:
- Imphal
- the Burma campaign
- Singapore
- the North African campaign
These are the events that had thousands of Indians, and also featured the exploits that earned Indians the Victoria and George Crosses more than two dozen times. It's a great opportunity that should be seized, but complaining about Dunkirk, of all films, just seems like complaining for the sake of it. If anything, the film needed more French.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."![]()
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I think it's the tendency of certain film critics and leftists to see absolutely everything through the lens of ideology. To them it is irrelevant if their were few Indians at Dunkirk. What is relevant is that Britain is "diverse" now, forgetting the country is still like 90 percent of the country is White. Therefore all films should reflect that in the name of making the masses be nicer to each other.
In Trump rallies I saw the third reich, in these people I see some of the more ridiculous antics of Soviet Censorship. Like banning Darwin because the Evolution involved competition not cooperation. We laugh but one can imagine, based on similar beliefs and logic, to see some Guardian Columnist going off about how this represents Neo-libralism and imperialism and that it sends the message that the weakest in society should be less valued.
I used to think the Nazi's and Communists were monsters of their own, but now I see they are merely the worst of the left right spectrum, and both share more with their respective evil than they care to admit.
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.I'm not really willing to ascribe "leftist" intentions to these criticisms, so much as nationalist ones. I've observed that the most strident criticisms in this regard are by Indian reviewers who see in a film where British people are the heroes fighting against a genocidal empire a refutation of their civic religion where Britain is Always Chaotic Evil. But what they shouldn't be asking isn't about why there isn't a token Indian scene in a movie about Dunkirk, but why a film about the parts of WWII where India was front and center are not being made very often.
edited 6th Aug '17 5:45:16 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
I agree—insisting that Indians should be on the beaches of Dunkirk is Black Vikings sillness but it isn't lefty/righty. More like a desire for multiculturalism taken to an ahistorical extreme.

You wouldn't like how French colonial troops are portrayed in the Sophia Loren flick Two Women.
Regarding post 70 above and the lack of a central character in Dunkirk—the movie did remind me a lot of some of those older cast-of-thousands movies like The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, movies with ensemble casts that were trying to dramatize great events. Actually it reminded me the most of Tora! Tora! Tora!, another movie that is a pretty good flick but didn't have a ton of character depth. There isn't a lot of character depth in Dunkirk. It was obviously a deliberate stylistic choice to have the main character be called "Tommy". I loved the movie and I didn't leave it wanting to learn more about Tommy's inner life or anything, but that's a valid point to make.
edited 4th Aug '17 11:13:54 PM by jamespolk