It could've been better.

Rating: 4/10 (7 December 2017)

I saw «Dunkirk» last night. I must say I was expecting something else, something more complete, something more complex, so actually I was disappointed. I was expecting to get to know more about Dunkirk like why it happened, the background, how come the French, Belgian and British armies got surrounded in that peculiar way and why the German army did not finished them off, after all, they only had to drive their tanks some miles forward and bomb them to pieces. Why did this not happen? What was the strategy that left the escaping armies completely defenseless to a powerful enemy? Were the Germans just being kind? I doubt it. Who in the end was responsible for this situation? They could've easily wiped out over 300000 troops. As anyone can see there are a lot of unanswered questions, and this film doesn't help, on the contrary. If the RAF was so infinitely superior to the Luftwaffe, how come the British were surrounded and trapped between enemy tanks and the sea? The film is short in answers and therefore I cannot put it in the category of Great War films. It falls merely as entertainment with shock effects. There are already a lot of critics that have mentioned the lack of character development, the problems with real-time following, and the sudden clipping from one scene to another without relation, so I will not stretch this anymore. But there is another thing that bothers me a bit and that is the lack of knowledge about the enemy. In most Great War films we get to know the enemy so we can be related to whom our film heroes are dealing with. Well in this film the enemy is practically anonymous. The Germans are completely non-existing! This film makes it very obvious the superiority of the great English Spitfire above the likes of the German Junkers-Stuka and Messerschmitt planes which makes it even more demanding to know more about why the British were defeated and pushed to escape in Dunkirk, this film does not make it easy in answers because Nolan insists to see things only from his own navel. This film could've been much better without breaking the budget too much with skipping repetitive scenes and making the enemy more visible. It seems that consequently the director of this film is avoiding getting to know the enemy. This mistake cuts the potential excitement that this film could've possessed. "Stalag 17", "The Great Escape" "The Longest Day", "Saving Private Ryan", "A Bridge Too Far", "Schindler's List", "The Bridge on the River Kwai" all great war films precisely because we get to know the enemy and therefore increase the complexity and interest in the scope of the film. Unfortunately "Dunkirk" is not one of these.