It should be called Dumb Kirk, but worse, it's an example of fascist film making.

Rating: 1/10 (4 August 2017)

This film is fascist because it is frame by frame intentionally coercive so as to deprive an audience of any sense of (1) reflection, and (2) personal power. We are taken though a soundscape of piercing, relentless psychological violence (hey, it's a war film!) with a "story telling" structure that creates hopeless, trapped characters every minute (hey, it's a war film!) in such aggressive editing that we, the audience, are dragged through at least thirty horrific keyholes and back again in the course of the "story". It's not a story. It's six, eight, twenty? stories, again edited so as to thoroughly disorient the audience and hammer us with one water boarding (often literally) after another. (hey, its a war film!) It's fascist because fascism breeds on violence, especially senseless violence and the emptying of personal and collective power violence brings. I forced myself to disconnect from the torture and was able to get both a perspective and angry.
Worse, the film wholly ignores the historical reality of the bone-headed military decisions by the French (the criminally absurd Maginot Line) and the British (war had been declared MONTHS ago) (and Hitler was the opposition). The film also sucks dry the already-desiccated hero narrative forced on US population these last twenty years. With writhing violins after an hour and a half of uninterrupted electronic chainsaw sound score, I almost threw up.
What I'd like to be sure of is that this Dumb Kirk crime somehow stops Britain but especially the US from continuing the endless wars in the middle east and Africa, where the war dead are beginning to creep up to that sacred WWII yard stick. Somehow I don't think it will. Because fascism wants to give us a world that is dominated by men and violence in which there is nothing to be done. Just like in Waiting for Godot.
The film would have been helped enormously by the presence of even one woman (not used for sex appeal), but preferably by thousands -- to counter the narrative of the coming world police state orchestrated by the global corporate state in which patriarchal, fascist principles rely on everyone staying at home, feeling scared, being compliant, and asking no questions whatsoever.
By the way, the stupefying dedication is (paraphrase) to all those who were affected by what happened at Dunkirk. So in a loose application, that's maybe all of the World War II population. But if it's trying to be specific, babies born around the time of Dunkirk are now 76 - 77 years old, and the armies of working class soldiers who were victimized by their Dumb Kirk militaries are approaching 100. I'm sure those in particular appreciated this coercive homage to mindless directorial self-indulgence.