wonderfully produced nonsense

Rating: 2/10 (30 July 2017)

My informal summary was: "a load of crap".
I could appreciate the wonderfully filmed set pieces, but the overall work was a mess.
First off the tripartite switching between Air:1 hour, Sea:1 day, Land:1 week, just didn't work. All 3 sections lost any sense of continuity, and you were left with a jumble of brief scenarios. For me this was particularly the case with the "Air" segments which just became boring interludes.
The other really bad decision, for me, was the choice of the incidents shown. They were just populist trivia that didn't give any sense of the actual battle. For instance, the "small ship" is obviously based on a well known case. But the circumstances were completely changed and sensationalised do it gave no insight into the actual events - and where did the manslaughter of the young kid come from??? This segment is actually an insult to the RN who organised and in most cases manned this aspect of the evacuation.
In contrast to the Air section, which was drawn out, the Land section was just a kaleidoscope of jumbled incidents that gave no sense of the passing of time (the evacuation took a week). There was supposed to be a minimal story line, but even so the uniform switching French guy and the prolonged hiding in an abandoned ship were pretty dumb, and where did the idea of "3 hour tides" come from. It was all pretty ridiculous, and furthermore the series of silly events, meant that there was no serious attempt to tie the "immersive effects" to any basis in the reality of Dunkirk itself.