Screen Rant’s “Dunkirk’s Confusing Timeline Explained” written by Sarah Moran is a unique piece of writing as it does not follow a typical review template as one would expect. The goal of this article is as stated in the title, to provide a better understanding to those who watched the film Dunkirk and did not achieve a full understanding. Moran’s interesting organizational and substance decisions strongly contribute to the article falling short of fulfilling this purpose as well as it could.
The first aspect that contributed to this article not being completely effective is the organization strategies the author used. The article is broken up into three sections: introduction, one week out, and one day out. The introduction provides a basic preview of what the article will entail, and sets up the article nicely to effectively provide closure to the target audience. However the next section is where the writing begins to stray away and lose its momentum. The introduction and the ‘one week’ portion are on the first page, and the second page contains the ‘one day’ section which could be a source of confusion for the reader, as both sections are providing a summary of the movie. Splitting the summary into two sections creates a distance between each part, which could disrupt the timeline for the audience, especially since the target audience had a hard time understanding to the script in the first place. Separation also provides a sense of closure when reaching the end of the first section, and based on the organization of the article and the rest of the website could lead to people believing they reached the end and leaving without actually finishing the piece. A solution to this problem would be to have the article on one page or to break to the next page in between the summary and analysis to better project to the audience.
The second of Moran’s mistakes was the lack of basic outline before charging into the meat of the summary. While the article did have much to cover, there was very little introduction to this piece. It would have been beneficial to provide the reader with a short background on the characters and maybe the setting as a whole. Since the target audience is people who didn’t quite understand the film’s story line the first time around, it would have made sense to slowly ease into the plot and making sure that there was no confusion as to who was who. The article came out a month after the release date of the move so many people may have seen the film a few weeks before reading the article and could have forgotten the characters and their names. The lack of introduction could be a source of confusion that drove people off the page before reading the body of the piece due to discouragement.
Dunkirk was an interesting film with a complicated timeline that constantly shifted points of view and it is understandable that one might need to search for information that would help them understand the movie better. However, Moran’s article was disappointing in the fact that it failed to provide anything more than a wordy overview with no background information. The odd organizational pattern and absence of introduction caused a drift from the author’s goal of providing a deeper understanding of the film to the audience. The author herself clearly has a great understanding of the film, and with the correct organization and substance could truly provide the insider knowledge that reader seeks and that she is trying to portray.