Cold, empty and lacking scale....

Rating: 5/10 (28 July 2017)

It's a visual spectacle, of that there is no doubt.
However. I was left feeling empty and disappointed for these reasons:
1 - The lack of all CGI ruined the film for me from the get-go. During the first beach scene's, it strikes you how 70's/80's the beach front buildings and windows are. That's because it is. It looks way more recent than wartime. It's wrong and it looks wrong.
2 - I had no sense of scale. The beaches seemed as empty as the dialogue. There were supposed to be 400,000 soldiers awaiting evacuation and many hundreds, of not several thousands of civilian boats coming across to rescue them. Watching the film felt like there were a few thousand soldiers and maybe 50-100 boats involved.
3 - The whole film is devoid of much dialogue. It meant that you really didn't connect at all with any of the characters - particularly the Hardy character who did little more than look menacing with his eyes in most shots.
4 - I really didn't like the way that the story-telling dotted about, seemingly randomly at times, to tell a short and limited story from differing perspectives, in a totally non-sequential way. It made a mess of the story-telling for me.
5 - Did the Hardy character really do what he does in the film? I think not.
A missed opportunity to have used this visual spectacular really hit home on what really happened, and what it was really like back in 1940 on Dunkirk beach, in the same way that the opening beach-landing scenes of Saving Private Ryan are indelibly etched into my mind as really giving a sense of visual perspective of how epicly awful it was to land on Omaha beach under enemy fire.
The visuals are great. The story-telling is poor. Overall, it's not a film I'll be rushing to see again.