Fails to deliver overall

Rating: 5/10 (10 August 2017)

I have been so looking forward to this movie. Having studied the evacuation of Dunkirk, many years ago and also having been to visit the beaches and also the wartime tunnels at Dover where much of the planning was conceived, my expectations was that this would be a movie to rival all WW2 movies before it.
However, all the way through the movies I felt like it was skimming the surface of what happened and never really got going at any point. I left deeply disappointed.
The movie itself is telling the story of the evacuation from several different viewpoints which are timed in with each other. This I felt was a really good concept, to get the views of civilians trying to help, soldiers, fliers and officers alike. Where it falls down in my opinion is that the film is almost totally devoid of script. The characters involved only have a few lines throughout the entire movie. It is hard to find any type of connection to them as there is no story about them.
But perhaps the biggest let down of them all is that there is literally zero mention of the epic planning, call to arms and execution of the Dunkirk evacuation. There is hardly any mention of Bertram Ramsey, the man responsible for the entire evacuation. This was the largest evacuation of troops in British military history. There were hundreds of private trawlers used, hundreds of aircraft, dozens of royal navy ships. This film failed to capture any of this and instead focused on a few individuals, but failed to give them a script.
Honestly I feel that if you didn't know the story of Dunkirk, before you went and saw this, you would leave still not really knowing, and this for me is the greatest let down by Nolan. This movie FAILS to actually tell the story of Dunkirk.
The music score by Hans Zimmer is excellent, the effects in the movie are excellent. It fails in almost every other department.