"We shall never surrender."

Rating: 6/10 (26 August 2017)

I'm not going to go into a long winded review of why I didn't care for this movie because a lot of others have said it a lot better than I can. I will however, mention the comment of another patron of the theater I was at while walking out after the end of the film. When I asked him if he followed what was going on in the story, he stated that it was "not what I expected". A very diplomatic way of putting it. Because he was with his wife, and the couple was elderly, is probably the reason why he didn't say it sucked.
What I got out of the picture was this - it was about soldiers drowning, near drowning, about to be drowned or already drowned. What I had anticipated going in, much as the aforementioned fellow movie goer probably did, was something that presented the sheer immensity of the evacuation effort that was the real Dunkirk. There's nothing in the film that approaches that size or scope, leaving one to wonder what made the events of Dunkirk so memorable.
The topper for all of this for me was a newspaper headline near the end of the picture that declared the character George (Barry Keoghan) a 'hero of Dunkirk'. His claim to heroism - the teenager was killed by a soldier who declared his cowardice and didn't want to go back to the front lines. I don't mean to disparage the kid, he was just doing his job the best way he knew how.
Regarding that scene which took place on a private boat in a rescue effort of evacuating soldiers, George's father came to that shell shocked soldier's defense before the event that resulted in George's death, stating to his other son that "He may never be himself again". Unfortunately, that's the way I felt leaving the theater.