Chris Nolan's expensive WW2 playground

Rating: 7/10 (2 August 2017)

Christopher Nolan is no original choice when it comes to picking favorite directors, and I'm no non-conformist in this sense, I liked very much every movie of his that I've watched so far. And while I can't say I dislike this either, I believe that Dunkirk is his inferior work.
From the technical standpoint, of course, everything is beautiful, with Warner Bros. basically letting Nolan make a small World War 2 of his own with real boats and planes and over a thousand extras. There's also an interesting gimmick with three timelines of different length being shown at the same time, as the events happening on the beach lasted a week, on the sea - a day, in the skies - an hour. It's still a gimmick, but a fairly interesting one, and if not for it, I'm afraid the movie would've been way too boring.
The problem is that Dunkirk failed to resonate with me in almost any way. I've read people say that the film is devoid of emotion, but I don't think it's exactly a problem here - an idea to make a war movie just about survival isn't a flawed one, we've had plenty of movies over-glorifying soldiers in the past. But still, my impression of the film was very superficial and started to immediately wither away even as I was walking out of the theater. The director obviously wanted to generate and hold suspense for the majority of the movie, but I thought that it didn't work, even though there were a few tense moments.
Two additional minor nitpicks are that the PG-13 rating shows more in a war film, especially after the recent Hacksaw Ridge, and that it looked pretty weird that there were only three Spitfires on the British side and a dozen of planes on the German side. As Wikipedia tells us, the airborne casualties of both sides were over a hundred planes each and while I get that Nolan couldn't get himself a whole working fleet of planes, their small number still looked off.
Another thing I've heard people praise is the soundtrack. Here Hans Zimmer thought that if he's a renowned composer unanimously praised by viewers and critics alike, he might as well just record a clock ticking and add some random drums to it and still get away with it. And alas! He succeeded. Waiting for him to record the sound of himself burping with drums and loud noises in the background and still being praised for the next movie.
So yeah, Dunkirk looks good and is loud, but that's about it, unfortunately. I would say that Mr. Nolan in general is not overrated, but this particular movie of his just might be.