Intense in a way you've never experienced before

Rating: 9/10 (2 September 2017)

"Dunkirk is worth seeing in the theater more than any other movie I've ever seen." - My SMS to my brother—who loves movies as much as I do—upon exiting the theater.
"I don't think I've ever paid money to be stressed out for two hours before." - The friend I watched Dunkirk with.
Dunkirk is a very unique film.
The left jab is visual. You have the wide open settings of the expansive beach at Dunkirk, the waters of the Channel, and the skies above both. There's plenty of other, "standard" shots as well, but the large open swaths of territory are what stick in the mind. They impart a sense of scale to what other movies might feel like condensing down for "dramatic effect" (or whatever). While I never quite felt like I saw an entire 400k soldiers on the beach, the amount of soldiers that were there were sufficient to convey that there were a LOT of lives on the line.
The right cross is chronological. The three story lines, whose threads we follow throughout the entire two hours, take place over different swaths of time—one happens within an hour, another within a day, and a third over the course of over a week. Yet this chronological disconnect between the story lines is not detrimental to the tapestry being woven here. Before realizing this disconnect, there were a couple of times when I was distracted by it being day in one scene but night in another, so an awareness of this aspect of the film might be helpful to have ahead of time (incidentally, this disconnect is communicated up-front in the movie from the start—the on-screen title of one location is subtitled "One Hour", while the next locale is "One Day", etc. I didn't pick up on this until reading the IMDb trivia section afterwards.)
However, it is in the audio realms that Dunkirk delivers its haunting— and extremely effective—uppercut. Two aspects stand out here. One, this is a film that Episode 7's Luke Skywalker would have felt at home in. There might be 50 lines in the entire movie, and yet, you know exactly what everyone is thinking or feeling at any given time. You can read it on their faces and see it in their behavior.
Yet other movies before Dunkirk have had minimal amounts of dialog. The true power behind the aural uppercut is the soundtrack. Viciously intense from start to finish, the score is not as much a piece of music as it is the sound of fight-or-flight adrenaline. It is a constant, never-ending presence throughout the entire movie, and your ears get about as much respite as those brave men on the beach. However, it never comes across as too much or inappropriate. It powerfully maneuvers every moviegoer's mind, heart, and even lungs to feel like you are a part of each scene—and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that none of those scenes were things you'd want to actually partake of. You've probably heard the saying that war is "months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror." Well, the score of Dunkirk captures those moments of extreme terror perfectly, and doesn't let you forget them in the rare interludes of boredom, either.
Christopher Nolan has K'd it O of the park (if I can for a moment utterly mix my metaphors). Dunkirk is a movie to be seen on the biggest screen you can get to. And apologies to a sizable portion of the world's population, but don't watch it with people who can't keep quiet during movies. It really needs to be experienced uninterrupted, start to finish.
I'll close by addressing one of the complaints about there being no story to it: utter nonsense. Perhaps the complainer was expecting a Hollywood twist to the well-known historical event. I'm sure the participants would have welcomed such a twist even more. Kudos to Nolan for not interjecting in with an incongruous love triangle or some other nonsensical "enhancement". In that sense, Dunkirk is to WWII what Rogue One was to the Star Wars universe—we all know how it ends, but it's the telling of the story that matters. And there IS a story, summed up perfectly in the movie's tagline: "When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them."