Good Attempt But Lacks Impact

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2017)

This was a good try to be sure, but in truth I felt underwhelmed when I left the studio. The film is technically near perfect but it fails to show the true scale of the evacuation or the civilian and military fleet that pulled it off. Also it totally failed to show the heroic defense by the French who held the Germans back for those vital few days and allowed the British to escape.
Early on Kenneth Branagh's character states that there are over 400.000 men on this beach yet we fail to see any more than 200 or so in any shot, the rest of the time the beach feels near deserted. Now I understand that hiring 400.000 extras for a film would be financially and logistically impossible yet without this kind of scale or even some clever CGI work this film feels like a few dozen guys running about on a beach being rescued by a handful of boats. Anyway, it was still a good try and the aerial dogfights with the Spitfires was magical, that alone made it almost worth watching, almost.