As if watching a movie on a very tight budget - boring, incorrect, soulless

Rating: 3/10 (7 July 2019)

I don't remember watching a movie this bad in a long time. And that comes from a Nolan fan *and* a ww2 fanatic. I have no idea why this movie is hyped as it is, but there was very little that attracted me to the movie.
1) Throughout the movie a total absence of scale is prevalent. You never have the feeling that Dunkirk was about 400,000 men crammed in a relatively small section of coastline. Empty, if anything, is the only word that describes most of the movie.
2) An unhealthy amount of recycling of the same locations makes the movie feel cheap. Most shots are framed in such a way that you never really get to see much beyond the absolutely necessary. The inside of a boat, a little cross section of a cruiser, a very close-up zoomed image of a pilot in a cockpit that doesn't even shake or show any signs of noise or discomfort. The same little stretch of beach with the exact same docking cranes features in various scenes - always the same angle, the same distance.
3) The dialogue is weak. Unnatural, sometimes almost as if part of more takes of dialogue that were removed later on. Short, abrupt, without conviction. Never feeling the tension as a reason to not talk. Or excessive boredom. Or sleep. No, it just feels like the characters didn't really have a soul.
4) The actors were generic and poorly chosen. They didn't feel like they were really unified with their character. Many of them looked alike and that's about as deep as we go.
5) There is a lot of "time stretching" going on in this movie. Things that would last 30 seconds or a few minutes in real life last an hour and a half in the movie. There is so little information to tell, so few scenes, boats, airplanes and so little story telling going on that they made every tiny accomplishment or happening last almost throughout half the movie, bit by bit, "interwoven" (and that is a word that makes it sound better than it is) with each other. But boring in the end.
6) The total lack of historical accuracy bothers me. It's not that Nolan has so much wrong in broad lines. No, it's quite accurate (also because he doesn't have much to tell, it seems). But the horrible depiction of for example the stranded fishing boat scene. After the first set of holes shoot up the hull, the soldiers are fighting among themselves "who needs to leave the boat to make it lighter". WHILE STANDING CHEST-DEEP IN WATER. Really, 70 kilos will make a difference when standing in 5-6 tons of floodwater?
Or the spitfire. Which flies at around 100 meters altitude, loses it's engine power but glides for seemingly forever.And forever. And forever. And then some. Just the actual seconds of flight time and the portrayed speed means it would have basically flown a dozen kilometers. But ...of course, it still ended up at the same tiny stretch of beach, same cranes in the background. Jesus.
7) CHEAP. I just can't put my finger on it, but the entire movie just feels "lower budget" than what I expected or would deem a minimum. The way the movie is edited doesn't help, a lot of the footage lacks cinematic grandeur, the music is predictable and somewhat repetitive. This movie can't even polish the shoes of intense, gripping productions like Band of Brothers. Literally the most boring scenes of that miniseries are still more interesting than the most interesting scenes of Dunkirk. And that's a sad conclusion to sum this all up with.
I feel like I'm wasting my time even writing this - the movie is just not worth really thinking about. I'm going to watch a few documentaries about Dunkirk to get the bad aftertaste of Nolan's failed recount out of my mouth.