An emperor without clothes, a film hugely overrated

Rating: 4/10 (17 March 2018)

Of all the films in 2017, the biggest disappointment to me was Christopher Nolan's over-packaged and over-publicized "Dunkirk", a film with aspirations of grandeur that ended up delivering a narrative mishmash that completely lacked emotional involvement.
My guess is that the film, displaying choppy editing and confusing transitions, might have been the compromised result of its filmmakers changing their minds while frantically trying to mold it into something cohesive. Watching it, at times I didn't even know where I was supposed to be, and at one point I turned to a friend who had accompanied me and asked, "why is it night here?" without realizing until later we had been seemingly in the hold of a ship. Moreover, it seemed an attempt was made to cover the narrative weakness by having actor Kenneth Branaugh stand around and deliver hackneyed lines (written by director Nolan himself) to take the place of dramatic action, scenes that seemed phoned in from another movie. But a more surprising weakness was the failure of the flying scenes to work up much excitement. Why its aviation scenes were so timidly done and so lacking in intensity, even in 70mm, astounds me still.
Finally, when the end credits came up on "Dunkirk", due to its need for more 'fleshing out' and clarity of focus, I felt I had experienced merely the outline of a movie instead of a completed one. And a war film that seemed to fail at the very simple things that even average war films used to achieve with ease.