Will Miller

I’m just going to start by saying, this favorite movie of all time, and the Oscars it one reflect why. Dunkirk won the Oscars for, Best Achievement in Film Editing, Best Achievement in Sound Editing, and Best Achievement in Sound Mixing. You probably notice all the sound related awards which are precisely why I love this movie because the sound design is excellent since there isn’t much dialogue the other sound has to be very good. These sounds include Stuka sirens, plane engines, artillery fire, bombs, and a fantastic soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. However, my favorite music is a stopwatch that plays the throughout the movie getting faster as thing become more intense and slower when things get calmer. This sound gives the viewer a sense of time running out and anxiety, and to convey this feeling the stopwatch only stops when they get back to Britan.

I thought the movie captured the feeling of day to day life in the trenches, the good and the bad. Even though the film did talk about and show the horror of the First World War, it also showed the excellent times the soldiers had like images of the soldiers socializing, smiling and even playing sports. One the that I especially liked is that it showed the British soldiers and the capture Germans getting along talking joking around, some Germans voluntarily helped the wounded brits. This idea of the British and Germans getting along is something I mentioned in my short film Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Baguettes where I said, “It makes you wonder if these people only hate each other only because their governments told them too. If there was no war, I wonder if some of them might have even friends.” There was also the fantastic restoration of the old WW1 film, where they took 100-year-old footage and made look like it was filmed on a modern camera, they added a 30 min Behind the Scenes video explaining how they restored the video and how they added sound to the video.