Underwhelming and myopic

Rating: 3/10 (15 August 2017)

The evacuation of Dunkirk was one of the most important moments in history, and a pivotal part of WWII. This movie had the opportunity to express the greatness and the gravity of this event, and it failed.
The flyover shots of a few dozen soldiers on the beaches, when there should be ten of thousands, failed to express the enormity of the situation. Similarly the dozen or so civilian boats, when there should have been thousands, underwhelmed their contributions. The attempt to humanize the story by showing a few individual vignettes, in one case a single incident shown from multiple perspectives, also failed.
No one character was engaging enough to impress the tension or magnitude of the situation. In essence this movie made a momentous and terrifying event a little boring. In doing so, it does a disservice to those that have experienced combat.