Dunkirk Underwhelms

Rating: 5/10 (7 August 2017)

Just saw Dunkirk. I am going to go against the flow and say I found it to be mediocre. Did not like many of the directing choices Nolan made. Many of his choices felt contrived and made it hard for me to maintain my willing suspension of disbelief.
Kenneth Branagh was in the film, but was heavily underutilized. We never got a feeling for the miracle that was Dunkirk. And we ended up with a surprisingly small film for such a big event. One example: over 800 small boats enabled over 300,000 British soldiers escape, yet we never ever saw that. Consequently, the film completely failed to capture the scale of this event.
I suppose Nolan was trying to give a view of Dunkirk from the perspective of a few hapless British soldiers who had a very small / micro view of the war. This particular group, unlike the vast majority of British troops, appeared willing to do anything to get back across the channel with little regard for their fellow soldiers. Ultimately, I just did not find them very believable and I really did not care about them.
Likewise, the French's only role was to try to get on the ships. One of main unsympathetic characters was a French soldier who stripped a dead British soldier to so he could pretend to be British in hope of getting across the Channel. The fact that is was the French that fought a fierce rearguard action that gave the British time to effect the rescue was ignored.
Scenes that could have been powerful - weren't - because the proper foundation to make them powerful was never laid.
In not using CGI to give the viewer the true scope of Dunkirk (using real boats, people, planes and ship would have been cost prohibitive), over 850 ships and over 400,000 troops, was not shown. One would have never guessed the RAF fought hard and deployed hundreds of fighters to combat the bombs raining down on the men waiting on the beaches, flying a total of 3,500 sorties and losing 145 aircraft while the Luftwaffe lost 156.
In the movie ships rolled over after getting hit by single bomb and the fact that Naval ships can actually fight back was ignored. In fact an armed civilian ship, a paddle wheeler, actually shot down 3 German airplanes en route to successfully ferrying 7000 soldiers back to England in seven round trips. So in the real Dunkirk larger ships survived multiple attacks from German aircraft and actually shot them down. We get none of that from Nolan. Consequently, he created a distorted and inaccurate view of Dunkirk.
I can appreciate artistic license, but Nolan went too far in creating his sparse and tiny Dunkirk.
So while I generally like war films, this one underwhelmed me. It was not a bad film, but it was inaccurate and there are many far better war films.
On the positive side I did see it in IMAX and some of the scenes were spectacular. The soundtrack was also powerful. If you want to see this film, see it in the theater and see it in IMAX. I do not think it is worth watching on the small screen.
We deserve a real film about Dunkirk.