This Year's 'There Will Be Blood' . . . .Spoilers

Rating: 2/10 (22 July 2017)

. . . . referring to another critic's darling that was actually a very, very bad movie.
This picture is even more badly miscalculated than 'Interstellar', which is saying something. Historically, Dunkirk was a logistic miracle, in which a disorganized flotilla of amateur yachtsman managed to spirit off 300,000 plus British soldiers, trapped by Nazi forces.
Now, if you want to do a micro story, fine. But you do have to put in scale. Instead, we have these meandering lines of soldiers on the beach, fewer numbers than in some cineplexes. We see nothing of the flotilla until 90% of the movie is gone, and even then it's a throwaway.
The bulk of the movie is spent on a single ship, a single Spitfire, and a couple of rather unlikable soldiers looking for a way home. It took me quite a while to realize that the stories were not in sync, that I was looking at several different time frames. How clever! What totally unnecessary complexity!
This might STILL have worked,except that Nolan does not bother with any more than the barest exposition of the characters. So instead of seeing the Grand Evacuation, we see the struggles of several ciphers, completely out of context.
Add to that an ear-splitting, incomprehensible score, and you have - not a disaster movie - but a disaster.