World War II for millennials

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2017)

It has finally happened. A WWII movie for kids with the attention span of a lightning bolt, who couldn't care less for historical accuracy nor want to get emotionally involved in anything. A series of dizzying and nauseating POV shots strung together coupled with loud, bombastic music. No plot, no characters, no arc, no sense of purpose whatsoever. Not much in the way of dialogue, and most of it mumbled and inaudible due to the loud music. War as a video game experience? Here it is.
Besides slightly nihilistic Nolan's take on the Dunkirk disaster stroke me as contradictory. 400,000 soldiers were stranded in Europe's longest sand beach, along with 500 tanks and thousands of vehicles and heavy weaponry. They were eventually evacuated by 933 ships, including 39 destroyers, suffering 68,000 casualties. The RAF flew almost 3,000 sorties and lost a whopping 106 planes. The Luftwaffe dropped 45,000 bombs on the city and harbour. I see two mutually exclusive ways of portraying this gargantuan military undertaking: full-on IMAX to capture the big picture or small-scale POV story to capture the human drama. For the former you would use long shots of panoramic vistas and intensive CGI to recreate the colossal numbers I just cited above. For the latter you would go gritty, hand-held camera, following a couple of soldiers through the whole ordeal.
Nolan tried to have his cake and eat it too and did both - and failed at both. Refusing to use CGI, he hired 1,000 extras, managed to get hold of 3 Spitfires, an old Heinkel bomber, a couple of Me109s and Stukas and one destroyer. The massive flotilla of smaller vessels is depicted by something around 20-30 yachts and cruise ships. So much for the gargantuan aspect of the operation. As for the POV action, we follow a pilot, an amateur crew in a leisure craft and a couple of soldiers stranded at the beach. None has any back story and in fact, I can't even remember their names. So there's little if any character development and you fail to connect with them in any meaningful way that would involve emotionally investing in their plight.
The factual mistakes in this movie are so many and so great that I won't even bother listing them here. Besides, Nolan has clearly jumped into the post-truth bandwagon so this is inconsequential. As many reviewers have pointed out "this is not a documentary" - Trump himself would endorse such a poignant rebuttal. Unfortunately once an actor or director has ventured into the world of superhero franchises, all possibility of objective and fair evaluation of their performance is lost. Forever. Fanatical praise and absolute contempt for constructive criticism will abound. Which is another hallmark of millennial thinking.