Count me in the minority who feel this is a disappointing movie with only "glimpses" of a war escape that doesn't permit the audience sufficient expanded, connected experiences to capture the totality of the sustained horror and human tragedy of military conflict. The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan (1998) is much superior that Dunkirk pales by comparison. There are too many small frustrating plot devices and sequences to mention. I began to have a strong desire to look at my watch and almost walked out of the movie half way through.
The movie seemed to be more of an director's fancy attempt to pitch a three virtual reality experiences about war like one might develop for a Disney theme park experience where you go into a darkened theater. Yet it's like especially with the aerial combat scenes that there are many real life video takes that one could attempt to locate if one wanted such vicarious technical experience rides. The intercutting only made this movie more a visual audio entertainment pack ride than a epic war movie drama. But the connection to the human drama and characters, unlike what seemed to be a manufactured boat sequence, was really missing for me. I didn't care about most of these characters.
If one wanted the "chaotic, incomprehensible and terrifying" as Kniff appears to, then one would be wise to use the cinematography of Aleksey German who directed Hard To Be A God (2013) instead of Christopher Nolan. Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor describes it as:
“Dunkirk,” with its scaled-to-be-a-masterpiece visual grandiosity, aims to be an epic of the spirit, but there is something weirdly underpowered about it. It’s a series of riveting tableaux, but the human center is lacking. When “Dunkirk” was over, I felt as if I had been through something, but it wasn’t a war, exactly. For all its painstaking realism, the movie resembles a great big impressionist abstraction. Maybe it’s not so different from Nolan’s other movies after all. Grade: B-
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