Put Down the Kool-Aid

Rating: 5/10 (21 July 2017)

Given the outright gushing of critics in praising this film, I was quite surprised to discover Dunkirk to be not only not deserving of such praise, but even worse, to be a cacophony of minimalist nonsense, topped off by one of the most ridiculous film climaxes in recent memory (more on that later). "Possibly the best war film of all time?" Not quite, I could name dozens better. In fact I struggle to think of many that are worse than this. My goodness, where to begin...
First I do not understand where the $150 million budget was spent. The actual story of the Dunkirk evacuation involved - literally - hundreds of thousands of men, and hundreds of boats and planes. In this film, we see....a few hundred men? 30 boats? Something like six planes? Where is the grand scale that a story like Dunkirk deserves, or really, demands? There was no grand scale. That is a heinous omission and oversight and ultimately fails to tell the story of Dunkirk as it should be told. And if you don't want to use CGI to achieve that scale, that's fine, but then either expand the real numbers of extras and props so it replicates what Dunkirk was actually like, or, don't do the film. A few soldiers standing around on the beach looks incredibly silly when the characters say on more than one occasion that there are over 300,000 men there. Where are they? We never saw them. Ludicrous.
Similarly, we see a few boats here and there, and a few planes. This does not come close to approximating the flotilla of ships, boats and other watercraft used - in reality over 800. It's hard to appreciate what a tremendous achievement the Dunkirk evacuation was - ultimately, the aim of this film I suspect - when we never actually see that achievement occur. We see a few boats and few planes. Literally a drop in the bucket of what Dunkirk was. Yet at the conclusion, as the men are disembarking, back safe in England, we are supposed to be swept up in a swelling feeling of appreciation for something that we never actually witness. Very bizarre.
The soundtrack, if you can call it that, was an escalating collection of random and intrusive blaring instruments that can be best described as 'noise.' I have no idea what the goal was there. Perhaps it was an attempt to convey what one might feel, the intense experience one might have, if he or she was in a war-time situation like this. Perhaps. A professional critic called it 'bombastic' and that's probably being generous. I am not lying when I tell you I had to take an Advil when I got back from the theater, thanks to the crazily escalating noise that overwhelms the latter part of the film. Yikes.
As for the climax, the scene of a Spitfire seemingly free of the laws of physics and gravity is bereft of all logic, and was such an eye-rolling piece of nonsense, no amount of criticism on my part can do it justice. Let's just say planes cannot keep flying indefinitely, much less maneuver and successfully engage other aircraft, when that plane has run out of fuel. The film deserves to be panned for this ridiculous scene alone.
This is not a great war film, it's not even a good war film. It is not typical or traditional story-telling, I will give it that. There are stretches of this film that lack dialogue and there is zero character development. While different, that's hardly unique (it's been done before). Perhaps some critics haven't understood that 'different' does not automatically translate to 'good' or 'great' - sometimes, it does not.
Put down the Kool-Aid. As my brother said to me when we walked out of the theater last night, "Assuming I would like this, I thought I would go see this again over the weekend. Not only am I not doing that now, I won't even bother watching this once it's on cable or Netflix." True that, bro. 5/10.