Fabulous Production with Little Historical Context

Rating: 8/10 (22 July 2017)

If I were to sum up Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" with one word, there is no question that it would be, "Wow". Among war movies, this one surely takes its place among such greats as "Saving Private Ryan", "Platoon", and "Full Metal Jacket" – although I'm not quite prepared to put it on the same level as "Schindler's List" (if that absolutely shattering masterpiece can be viewed as a war movie, that is).
"Dunkirk" started on its first release day at an astounding 9.0 on IMDb, but by the time of this writing, it has come down to a (probably) more reasonable 8.x. (I gave it an 8 myself.) I'm not going to give away any plot points, but then, for those of you who are familiar with the events of Dunkirk and its ultimate role in World War 2, there's really not much to give away, regardless. (For those of you who are not familiar with Dunkirk's place in history, I strongly urge you to look it up on Wikipedia or some other source and educate yourself about it. I would even urge this BEFORE you see the movie, because understanding its place in history will only increase the movie's impact for you.)
But to get to my review of the movie: The reason I "only" gave it an 8 is because, for all the fabulous execution and production quality that is a hallmark of every Christopher Nolan movie, I did not get a sense from the movie of the absolutely critical role that the Dunkirk evacuation had on the eventual outcome of World War 2, which is still the seminal event that shaped the world as we know it today.
If the Dunkirk evacuation had not taken place and/or succeeded, then suffice to say everybody in the UK would probably be speaking German today, and the USA would be only one of a cluster of somewhat dominant powers around the world – certainly not the singularly preeminent superpower that we have become since then. Yes, Dunkirk was really, truly THAT important and critical, even if it didn't seem so at the time.
Nolan seems to have set all this aside, however, and chosen to focus instead on the immediate stories of those who were stranded on the beaches, trying desperately to find a way to get across the English Channel to the ostensible safety (?) of the British isles.
The movie is (thankfully?) not as bloody as "Saving Private Ryan", but irrespective of this, in telling those stories, Nolan certainly and without question powerfully succeeds at giving us the sense of you-are-there-and-your-life-is-in-imminent-peril along with the soldiers. We feel the unrelenting combination of hopelessness, terror, and desperation that were surely rampant on Dunkirk's beaches as the Luftwaffe casually used the long lines of soldiers waiting their turn to be evacuated as target practice.
Most viewers would probably not consciously realize this, but the one single element that contributed (for me, anyway) to these relentless feelings was Hans Zimmer's score, even more than what was visually taking place on the screen. In my experience, this is easily the most nerve-wracking, uncomfortable-to-hear Zimmer score that I have encountered. And it's obvious that this is precisely what he had in mind.
There is not one single melody anywhere that I could hear. The whole thing is nearly endless, omnipresent tonal/sonic ambiance. And this ambiance is usually characterized by morphing clusters of dissonance interspersed with nervously tapping/knocking rhythms that will subconsciously refuse to let you relax at any point, just as the soldiers on the beaches could never truly relax.
Then, when the next Luftwaffe plane appears out of the clouds and begins another strafing/bombing run, the music roars up into a thunderous mass of atonality that surely evokes the soldiers' sense of impending death with devastating effectiveness. There were people around me in the audience who were visibly gripping their armrests and tensing up off of their seats during these parts, as Zimmer's score gave us a sense that the planes were coming for US, not just some esoteric character on the screen.
So to sum up, Nolan's "Dunkirk" does a fabulously effective job of conveying what it was probably like to be on those beaches and what it felt like to get away – for those who did. But if you're looking for a movie to put the Dunkirk evacuation into an overall historical context, then this is not it.