Gary Oldman doesn't look much like Churchill, but he does a spectacular job of capturing him. Unlike the other Churchill movie that came out this year, which is set on the eve of D Day and The Crown, which has Churchill during the waning days of the British Empire, this is set during the crisis that began WWII. It was undeniably the darkest hour for England but it was Churchill's finest hour. The German's had devastated the French and Belgian armies, and had almost the entire British army pinned down on the beaches at Dunkirk. They were trapped between the Germans and the sea, and there were insufficient Naval ships so that there wasn't hope of bringing even a fraction of them home. In addition to the tragic loss of life, they would have been without an army. Churchill, who had correctly assessed the danger of Hitler from the very beginning, wanted to fight, fight to the death, while others wanted to negotiate peace. Churchill's response in the movie was "You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in it's mouth.", meaning that England would not retain independence or it's colonies in a negotiated peace. All the while he is fighting his counterparts he also mobilized civilian boats, almost 900 of them, to go to Dunkirk and bring the army home, which they did in a spectacularly successful operation. His "We shall fight on the beaches", which was characterized by his opponent, Viscount Halifax as "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.", thereby saving Europe (with some help from Russia, and eventually the United States).
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