Does NOT live up to the hype

Rating: 5/10 (22 June 2018)

I remember when Dunkirk came out, there was a lot of hype and rave reviews. Watching it now, a year after release, I'm disappointed.
I'll start with what I liked: the costumes looked authentic, if not a bit too clean considering they are on a beach running for their lives. I thoroughly enjoyed the dogfights, mainly due to the cinematography.
In fact, the dog fights are the only parts of the film that I thought had decent camera work. The rest of the film had shots that felt too cramped, dark or confusing. British officers mentioned there were 400,000 men on the beach but you never see more than a few thousand. Some shots of the British merchant fleet lingered for way too long.
The sound was clearly designed for the IMAX experience, so I couldn't get the full feeling out of my meagre 5.1 system at home, and therefore I won't comment on the sound effects. However the music was straight up horrible. Is anyone else getting tired of Hans Zimmer and his atmospheric beats? They serve the same purpose as those cheap videos you find on Facebook where the music makes something seem to have emotion. If you turn off the music, you are left with an emotionless husk of an advertisement. Well I felt like it was similar in this movie. Way too forced, exaggerated and always in the background.
Finally, the timeline was just plain confusing. Some sequences felt like they were supposed to be happening simultaneously, except one location was in night time and the other in day. Sometimes I felt like the characters were in the middle of the channel when in reality they were a couple of hundred metres from the shoreline. And some of the soldiers that the movie follows look almost exactly the same, further confusing who you're supposed to be looking at.
All in all, some individual scenes had great action, tension and authenticity to it. But these were few and far between. The modern port cranes at Dunkirk, the rows of soldiers in clean uniforms, forced music and overall confusion all served to take me out of the movie.