Opening Scene Similarity Flaws
The opening scene of Dunkirk of British soldiers foolishly running down a town street only to get shot down reminds me of a scene from the updated War of the Worlds (2005) directed by Steven Spielberg as people are running away from gigantic Martian contraptions that just ray gun them into dust. Unlike We Were Soldiers (2002) which opens with Vietcong attacking a French platoon on a dirt road from both sides of the road, the British soldiers in Dunkirk seem to foolishly forget to use the apparently the abandoned buildings all along with entire length of the street to use for cover and even worse as they continue to attempt to reach a fence while being shot at directly even though there appears to be a cross street where they could easily have escaped the bullets by just going around a simple corner. While civilians might have fled in terror, I don't think that trained British soldiers would have simply forgotten basic training of evasion tactics, especially if one is going to die. Too bad actors with a military background in this movie didn't complain to the director of this huge oversight. I guess being you are there experience doesn't include authentic realism.
The Your Are There Approach Flaw
Knipp's insistence that Dunkirk's primary strength lies not so much on story or characters (which is apparently very diminished in this film) but on the apparently real vicarious experience of being in an actual war scene that individual audience members are allowed to experience has a fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that film technology isn't yet sufficient to offer what Knipp is really seeking. I'm reminded of, by now outdated, scene from Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) where Linda Montag played by Julie Christie, the wife of the main character, is enraptured by a stylized soap opera broadcast on a full wall screen which supposedly allows individual audience members to directly participate as if they, and only they, are part of the soap opera. This fascinating participant technique is supposedly made possible through the advanced technology of spy cameras in every home and the ability of the actors to ask generalized questions of the individual audience members where an obvious gap in the dialogue appears and the name of the audience member is inserted making it appear that the audience member is being personally talked to which is apparently not the case.
The problem of the audience member as the primary character in Dunkirk approach is that unlike actual characters in the movie, such characters have a comprehensive historical context from which to experience their surroundings and circumstances in the movie whereas as in the case of Linda Montag they remain starkly disconnected from the events being presented to them. Most audience members do not have the military basic training, the prolonged periods of waiting around, of the apparent associations and friendships seemingly developed in the movie, the same motivations and persona as being depicted. Instead of the brilliant use of first person, found footage approach that made The Blair Witch Project (1999) so effective, Christopher Nolan still distances the audience using perspectives that a real character could never obtain if they had actually been at Dunkirk. Dunkirk falls starkly short of Knipp's criteria for you are here experience. We may have to wait at least ten more years for quantum computers to be able to tap in our individual brains to create individualistic movie scenarios in which audience members are likely to stay home and connect themselves up into a Matrix (1999) like virtual world instead.
The Impossible Flying Machine of The Ending Sequence
A real problem about the ending scene was the improbable, fantasy of a single engine fighter prop plane that continues to glide and glide without fuel forever and forever and even able to shoot down an enemy aircraft, one that still could outmaneuver with its own fueled engine. That whole unbelievable sequence really made Christopher Nolan look overly dramatic and manipulative in trying to come up with some fantastic ending that really should have crashed and which in some ways it did. I'm also reminded of the much more impressive battle scene from Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) which unlike Dunkirk truly portrayed the epic nature of the thousands and thousands of soldiers involved in each respective scene. Alexander making a sweeping turn with his cavalry around what appeared to be a sea of soldiers. Others have complained about how puny Christopher Nolan's ending scene is regarding the supposedly 300,000 soldiers that were supposed almost stranded near Dunkirk. When comparing these two movies, it is fairly obvious how understated and diminished the magnitude of Dunkirk's underwhelming magnitude of the actual heroic efforts and the immensity of the potential loss to Britain this escape would have resulted in.