An assault on my ears

Rating: 4/10 (28 September 2017)

I went to see Dunkirk at the very end of it's movie theater run. Therefore I've heard how great it is, and was expecting to be impressed. Maybe I was expecting too much but I was underwhelmed.
Now a day later I have found out that 'the Mole' is a dock for loading ships. Where the screen showed 'The mole, one week', 'The Sea, one Day', and 'The air, One Hour' it meant that there was going to be three different story lines occurring over one week, one day, and one hour, simultaneously. I didn't realize, while watching the film, that that was how the film was setup. (I was trying to figure out what a Mole was. It would have really helped if they said "The Dock - during one week", etc. Plus the movie continuously cuts back and forth between these story lines. So you move forward in time, then back, then forward. Throw that all together and you can see why the movie is very confusing to some.
I'm very familiar with the story of Dunkirk so the jumping around from time line to time line didn't throw me off that much. Except for when it was obviously night time in one story, and daytime in another. If I only had known that there were three movies going on at once. It would have made a lot more sense.
My biggest problem with the movie was the sound track. Perhaps this only occurred in my theater (I doubt that), but it was oppressively loud. Not just the bang bang of guns firing, that's expected in movies these days, but here there is constant background droning. Not airplane noise - just really loud single note background noise. I took a tissue and stuffed it into my ears within 10 minutes of the start of the film, and I never felt that I could take the plugs out.
The next biggest problem is the lack of a coherent story. I went with a friend who didn't know the Dunkirk story, and she had no idea what was going on. Over 300,000 soldiers were evacuated! You never would have known that through this movie. A third of the soldiers evacuated were French! You will have the opposite idea after the movie. Hundreds of small boats helped in the evacuation! The film shows about 12. The real WWII soldiers were well disciplined, and while there is always chaos in war, there was a chain of command in control! In this film there seems to be 3 people of high rank and everyone else is a private and on their own.
There are some good points to the movie. Not enough to justify the current price of admission, but it wasn't a total waste.