Real WW II vintage fighter planes in aerial combat, and abject fear etched on every face faithfully deliver the film's sole premise: War Is Hell.

Rating: 10/10 (28 July 2017)

As a pilot myself, the gobsmacking POV aerial dog-fighting sequences alone were worth the price of admission. Director Chris Nolan used actual World War II vintage fighter planes instead of CGI, cartoon-like substitutes. Real pilots flying real fighters, chasing the enemy planes through the clouds and skimming over the surface of the English Chanel. Punctuated by the visceral growl of twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engines powering the British Spitfires overflying the bedlam on the beaches below. Wow.
Before I saw pic (at an IMAX in 70mm, the only way to fully appreciate pic), I read a scathing review by Rex Reed, usually a reliable and fair critic. Reed's review scolded Nolan for having the music pot out much of the dialogue in pic. Incredibly, Reed totally missed the point of pic, which is an almost total reliance on visuals, with the music track and voice tracks in distant secondary and tertiary roles respectively.
Pic is a quintessential motion picture, meaning it is meant to be seen and actually felt by the audience, not heard like a play. In this regard, Nolan succeeds exceptionally well. Pic is clearly reminiscent of many of the silent films of yore, which relied more on visuals than the talkies that eventually succeeded them. Yet Nolan avoids the often hammy performances found with most silent film actors, instead relying on the bowel-stirring fear etched on the faces of soldiers either trapped in a sinking ship or helplessly being shot at by an unseen enemy.
In short, Nolan understands, and, most importantly, executes the most basic premise of motion pictures: show us, don't tell us.
Some reviewers have complained that actors of some stature, like Kenneth Branagh, were relegated to embarrassingly minor roles, and the meaty roles were given to unknowns. Well, this historical event is about 400,000 British soldiers trapped on the French beach at Dunkirk. There was no Patten, MacArthur, or Montgomery involved. It was a rescue effort thrown together and run by whomever was available. There will be no nominations for Best Actor. There is no place for such an upstaging role when juxtaposed against this colossal cinematic tableau of an entire army facing either rescue or utter defeat.
Reviewers who have complained about the lack of character development simply fail to understand exactly what, and not who, the real star and the premise of pic are: War itself, and that War Is Hell.
The absence of the standard-Hollywood, predictable, three-act American Narrative format is a refreshing change indeed, yet many have complained about the "lack of story." There are four hundred-thousand men trying to escape annihilation facing a cold, empty sea, getting shot to pieces with the Germans at their backs. No story? Are you kidding?! That's 400,000 stories, and we get to see a handful of them registered in extreme closeups of their faces. You feel like you were really there, within the claustrophobic confines of a ship full of soldiers desperate to escape the slaughter, or the dizzying POV shots of aerial combat filmed from real fighter planes in real flight.
As for music and the shattering sound of bombs and ordnance exploding covering up dialogue, it gave pic a verisimilitude that most war pics lack. War is noisy. Really noisy.