I can't really imagine this being done any better

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2017)

I'm going to rate this a 10 (which I rarely do) because I just can't imagine this subject being done any better on film. It's going to be a certain Oscar nominee for best picture, director, cinematography, and who knows what else. My wife and I just got back from seeing it in a packed audience during its first weekend of release and we are still climbing down from the superb but unrelenting dramatic tension that carried the film from beginning to end.
Although the evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk was very early in WW II (1940) and looked like a military disaster, in fact it was already a turning point in the war because Britain successfully saved more than 330,000 soldiers from either obliteration or internment. Director Nolan tells this vast story from the shifting viewpoints of several very focused individual sub-stories which keep you totally, seat-grippingly involved: one small yacht among the armada of little boats that crossed the Channel to retrieve the soldiers; two Spitfire pilots doing battle with German bombers and fighters; a handful of soldiers trying to do nothing more than survive long enough to get on a safe boat. Take a big canvas and make it personal.
The camera-work makes you feel like you are right there, right now, in the moment. The sequences in the air particularly were flat-out stunning. Some scenes you get to see multiple times from different viewpoints (desperate soldiers in the water, men on the boats, the Spitfire pilots) as the story loops around and back in incredibly clever split-time format; Nolan is a genius. And Hans Zimmer does it again for scoring music that ratchets up the tension right away and keeps it there (and just wait for his quotation of Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations at the high point of victory with the arrival of the small boats).
I came out of the theater realizing that it is very good to be living in a time and place without war. Yesterday I saw an item on the internet about a 97-year-old war vet who was there on the beach of Dunkirk as a 20-year-old. He saw the movie as soon as it was out and according to him, the real thing was just like that.