Gonna take a shot at reviewing this (no pun intended)

Rating: 5/10 (21 July 2017)

I'll start with the good. Nolan's refusal to use sets creates a wonderful atmosphere. I really felt like I was there on the beach with them, I felt the gloom and the cold and the mist and the enclosed spaces. The contrasting sunset on the sea with the catastrophe of war made me feel deeply for the humans who experienced this. I enjoyed the humanity in the beginning, the men searching for water and trying to poop anywhere possible.
However, my red flag went up at the informative slides at the beginning. In one swift move, any chance of mystery and allure was crushed. Obviously this is a historical event so major spoilers aren't really possible. But, this isn't a documentary. Let the stories unfold. Give us information in text if necessary, but omit the end outcome. "The men waited for a miracle."
Okay. So, we now know this movie is about them getting this miracle. Done. We already knew that. Don't tell us, show us.
I personally am not a fan of the way Christopher Nolan directs. In this movie as well as Batman, the audience is left visually lost. There are no point of references, no connected images that help us make heads or tails of exactly what's happening. This movie is unnecessarily convoluted. It took me awhile to understand that we are cutting between three different time lines. This is a fantastic tactic, if done with intention. In Dunkirk, it was all just... kind of happening. The film manipulates you by using incredibly loud sounds, which didn't bother me at first because I felt like I was really there with them, but when the film showed itself to be lacking in other ways, I felt fooled by the cheap trick.
I found a lot of the film to be simply inaudible. I dreaded the conversations between the commander and the colonel. For me it went "blah blah blah, home" "blah blah blah, home" "blah blah blah, civilians" At one point we even discovered that our stowaway friend was French. I thought it was more of an indiscernible English accent, but my French friend who I saw the movie with filled me in afterwards, and he only knew what happened because he speaks French.
Is that a huge negative? Not necessarily. But it felt like I was being left out. There's two types of movies. There's a movie that takes you into it, effortlessly. It isn't something you are watching but something you are apart of. The other type of movie is one that you actively need to watch. You could take it or leave it. It doesn't command your attention.
The main event of this movie was people getting off ships, people getting back on ships, people getting off ships, people getting back on ships. There was no through-line to look to for guidance. It didn't highlight the story of Dunkirk from any specific or interesting angle. Like I said before, it just kind of happened. The point of this movie is that it happened. Which, okay, that's fine. But, on top of that, key ingredients of the actual event were missing!
The real event included French and Candian and Belgian troops all evacuating over a weeks time, with the small boats. It wasn't suddenly one easy trip the way this movie presents it to be. And while this was happening, British and French men had to stay behind and fight in order to let the others escape. In addition to that, we didn't once see a man on the other side, narrowing and dehumanizing this story.
It's oddly convenient that everyone cheered with excitement when the small boats showed up, considering everyone who had gone out into the sea for the past week had been getting slaughtered. Seems less like real men experiencing this in real time, and more like a Hollywood director knowing the end of this story. This part, seemingly the main event of Dunkirk was completely glossed over. Seeing the civilians reach land, seeing the interactions between them and the soldiers, seeing the gratitude and stress and exhaustion is essential. And we got none of it. If your one goal in making a movie is to tell it how it is, at least tell it how it is.