Impressive on Technicalities, Complete Failure on Scale

Rating: 1/10 (22 July 2017)

Dunkirk is a visual treat for art-buffs and students of cinematic discipline. But for everyone else, especially those who love history, the movie is a massive failure due to it's sheer incompetence in capturing the scale and import of the biggest military evacuation in modern history- 3,38,000 allied soldiers saved by over 1000 boats and ships in just a week.
Dunkirk was not just any other battle incident in WWII. It's the story of how a large number of civilian vessels and navy ships safely transport around an enormous number of soldiers back to home. Its about achieving impossibility, doing a miracle, defying all odds only because so huge number of people were to be saved by so many untrained rescuers. Dunkirk is all and only about scale. Take this scale out and it becomes meaningless. Ask yourself - would anyone had given entire incident a second glance if there were 1000 soldiers to be saved and 20 odd boats came from Britain to do the job? No one, including Christopher Nolan himself.
Yet he takes this subject and almost in a blasphemous treatment of its importance, does away with the very scale that made Dunkirk 'Dunkirk'. What you see is an empty beach, a handful of soldier, a few odd boats in water, and two spitfires in sky, trying to play out a theatrical enactment of entire event. And that's what this movie is- just theatrics and technicalities- creating temporal disturbances in story lines to impress the gullible, patching oddball narratives to cover- up for plot weakness, raining down musical scores to hide its lack of substance.
I hope Mr Nolan never makes a movie on memory of Hiroshima attack - because then instead of a giant mushroom cloud that killed over 40,000 souls and decimated a city we will see a mild explosion and a couple of smoked huts.