Red Badge of Dunkirk?

Rating: 5/10 (20 July 2017)

Where to begin... The "soldier lost in the complexity of war" has been done before, and I had high hopes for the film, but I was just disappointed. First, this movie is grim. Not grotesque, just depressing and grim, so prepare yourself. After reflecting on it a while, I think the movie just felt too thin. Thin on scale, thin on character development, thin on dialogue. For a movie called "Dunkirk", if you don't know anything about the battle going in, don't expect much coming out. It's really 3 interwoven vignettes about personal experiences during the battle, mainly 1 group fighting (air), 1 group running away (land), and 1 group trying to get into battle (sea). But for a massive operation with hundreds of planes and ships and hundreds of thousands of men, it just felt puny. Imagine a movie about D-Day where the invasion force is 3 allies against 3 Germans on the beach, with a couple of planes and a ship tossed in for drama. That's the feel. Movies like this can work if they have the feel of man as a small cog in massive machinery, but this just missed the mark for me. And the music was grating. Several times it overtook the screen action in a glaring, bad way. Just not a very good film. Not a total clunker, but not great by ANY means.