Geoffrey wrote:To rank them from best to worst in descending order:
Mark Rylance
Harry Styles
Cillian Murphy
Tom Hardy
Tom Glynn Carney
Fionn Whitehead
Jack Lowden
Kenneth Branagh
Aneurin Barnard
Barry Keoghan
James D'Arcy

The bottom four in my list are pretty bad. Fionn was unimpressive.

Nik82 wrote:Branagh fourth from last?? Well I guess you're entitled to your wrong opinion....

Seriously though, he was amazing!

Kiwinights wrote:I loved Fionn Whitehead and Barry Keoghan in the younger cast.

Fionn probably has the least lines of any of the "leads" in the movie save Tom Hardy's character, and he doesn't get to do any heroic or cool stuff. Yet he's not what you would expect for a near-silent lead. Despite being the audience surrogate, he's not there to be an empathetic open box, your wide-eyed male ingenue; there's something haunted and evasive about him instead. His later defense of the French soldier reveals a decent core that's been hardened by deep-seated trauma, not the same kind we see in the shivering soldier, but a deeper kind of resigned malaise. You see it again after he finishes reading Churchill's speech and looks up with an ambivalent expression, seemingly unmoved by a landmark speech. I read somewhere that Nolan decided to make him the last shot instead of the burning plane after watching the dailies, and I adore it—it's the exact right tone to remind us that what comes next is not victory, but five long years of bloody slaughter. None of their fates are secure.

Barry made probably the exact opposite impact, in that he is very much a wide-eyed innocent, full of hopes for adventure and heroism, and it's because we so instantly take to his character and his hopes (or I did, at least) that his crushing, futile fate strikes such a blow. I can''t remember the last time I felt legitimately shocked by any death in a war movie. But he's the exact type that tends to survive or die in a heroic way. He was excellent, and I'm looking forward to checking him out in Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Nomis wrote:I don't think he's seemingly unmoved, he lets the words sink in contemplates what has just happened and what this means, it's just the beginning

Kiwinights wrote:

Nomis wrote:I don't think he's seemingly unmoved, he lets the words sink in contemplates what has just happened and what this means, it's just the beginning

I mean unmoved in the sense that he's not having a visibly sentimental reaction to it. Alex is clearly jubilant about the shift in public narrative, and we the audience are probably feelin' a lot over Churchill's famous words, but the character reading them is obviously taking it in differently, and probably not in the way we expected.

Kiwinights wrote:

Nomis wrote:I don't think he's seemingly unmoved, he lets the words sink in contemplates what has just happened and what this means, it's just the beginning

I mean unmoved in the sense that he's not having a visibly sentimental reaction to it. Alex is clearly jubilant about the shift in public narrative, and we the audience are probably feelin' a lot over Churchill's famous words, but the character reading them is obviously taking it in differently, and probably not in the way we expected.

Ruth wrote:

Kiwinights wrote:

Nomis wrote:I don't think he's seemingly unmoved, he lets the words sink in contemplates what has just happened and what this means, it's just the beginning

I mean unmoved in the sense that he's not having a visibly sentimental reaction to it. Alex is clearly jubilant about the shift in public narrative, and we the audience are probably feelin' a lot over Churchill's famous words, but the character reading them is obviously taking it in differently, and probably not in the way we expected.

That's what I absolutely love about the end. It's the most sentimental part of the movie (and still its sentiment doesn't even reach nor exceed the overmanipulated or forced emotions of different films), and, despite what had just happened, we're supposed to be cheering for those young guys and we all honestly do - I know I did, because the movie felt like such a tense and draining experience and you're truthfully being glad most of them make it out. But there's more sinister, almost apocalyptic feel to it at the same time. Pretty much much all of the second half of the movie gave me these thoughts, but by the end of it and especially that speech and last shot - I couldn't shake those thoughts out of my head - how bitter and tragic it is that not only they would have had to live with those experiences, but that most likely none of that was the actual end for them - and Tommy realized that.