This movie is not really a movie, it is art, and this review will treat it as such.

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2017)

First of all this movie is not really an entertainment product. Therefore what you know about film is now invalid. In order to truly understand this film you must expect it to be nothing like a movie you know. If you do not, you will not be able to see this film for what it really is, let go of prejudice and comparisons, because they don't apply.
Step 2: Due to cultural heritage of movies, letting go can be tricky, especially if you are a younger viewer, whose knowledge about movies is based on the MCU. This is because of dialogue and especially the kind of dialogue you are used to in movies where people die and baddies are really powerful. You will not find any dialogue to paint the background of any character. It is widely understood that a character must be specially known in order to care about him or her. However, there is no point in making a flat generic cliché story to really understand that this character is really important, if you actually don't have unimportant people to begin with. Caring about a few people out of 400000 is actually if you think about it a little messed up. We humans are equally important when it comes to our lives. Usually promoting one soldier in a war movie and defining bad people is done through cannon fodder stand ins and mass murder on gigantic scale, or just crucifying key people. However, if you see things from a more sane perspective, all lives matter, and if you were one of them you might find that desperation makes you think about yourself as more important. Once you find something different that is then a reason why. If 400000 soldiers are desperate, and one need to go for the pack to survive what would you do were you one of them?
Step 3 - watch the movie: There are no soap opera scenes, you will experience that bullets are terrifying. But most importantly look not to dialogue but to actions and situation to understand what is going on, where do they look what are their motives behind this and that action, and finally listen to the environment. They say that an image says more than a thousand words, or as Batman would put it: It's not who I am underneath, but my actions that defines me. This is a movie where you are meant to feel and observe the full experience. Because this war movie is as real as they get. Forget about faces and look at them as anyone even yourself, understand that who Harry Styles and Tom Hardy are really don't matter. The point is exactly that you shouldn't be able to tell, as they are not meant to be important, they are all just people fighting for their lives. England already lost the battle, they need their soldiers home if they are to not lose the war too! Each soldier want to be the one who survives, thus important characters ruins the plot; anarchy. This movie is really a window into the past, and one which quite accurately actually show what happened. Which is truly astonishing and terrifying.
Before concluding, we must understand that time in this movie plays a central part, as the noose tightens, so does the 3 time-lines, which get more and more intertwined, this means more and more cuts, because each time line has a different time span. These cuts are made with care and the music gets more and more intense as we go, it really is something you won't appreciate fully until you have left the cinema! This movie also looks beautiful, but it has to be authentic if you are to believe you are there. It is very rare I sit in a cinema and actually get physically engaged, I don't really recall that happening, not even with cheap jump scares. This movie is psychologically really heavy on a subconscious level, and you really should think about pg-13 if your children are not mentally strong, but it takes an intelligent and adult mind to also truly grasp the horrors fully, war crimes are being committed and they are not imprinted in your subconscious disbelief that these things actually happened in real life, but the true horror is that they did. Acknowledging the care and effort the director put in this movie is the only fair thing to do... you may not like what you see for entertainment, but that's not really the point either! This is art, a TRUE master piece. This is something else, which is what in my eyes is the best movie ever made, outstanding and incomparable. It is like saying that Mona Lisa is better than the statue of David, it doesn't really make sense. You may like the painting more than the statue, but that doesn't mean that the statue is better. What makes this movie better than any other movie to me, is that the director cared and broke all rules, because he followed his own. This movie might not be for you, but if people don't feel connected to the horrors of this movie, they simply didn't know how to appreciate it. Thus the two opinions on this movie are those who didn't get the point and people who don't like what it is, and then those who loved it and can appreciate it for what it is, however there are most definitely those who think any movie by Christopher Nolan is a master piece, and I don't think they are honest to them selves. Dunkirk is a master piece, and thus by definition and its own rules it can only be 10/10... but a thing of which there are only one, it's both the best and the worst. Thanks for reading.