The technique in this movie is astounding. The story, and the history, not so much.

Rating: 7/10 (8 September 2017)

The most astounding thing in this movie, for me, was the cinematography. It is eye-poppingly riveting, and often very beautiful. From the early scene where we suddenly see the beaches of Dunkirk spread out before us against the brilliant blue of the sea, through many following scenes, the color and the framing of many of the scenes is truly remarkable. The cameraman clearly has a painter's eye.
The action photography is also often remarkable. The filming of the dogfights, with constantly tilting cameras, gave you some idea of what it must have been like to be in those fighter planes.
The various stories - on the pier, in the skies, on the small British pleasure yacht, on the sinking trawler, etc. - were sometimes juxtaposed to great effect, each one heightening the effect of the preceding one.
The music - and use of sound - in the movie was also dead on, heightening the tension over and over.
In short, this movie held me glued to my seat almost from the get-go.
But that did not keep me from seeing the problems.
The first is a matter of taste. Once the tension starts, it almost never lets up. I realize that for some viewers that's a plus. I could have used some variation.
There is, for all intents and purposes, no real acting in this movie, and certainly no character development. An occasional break in the tension to develop the characters to some extent would have made the movie more interesting to me.
My big issue, though, is the way this movie treats history. From the first scene on the beach, where we see the British soldiers lined up waiting to board a ship to evacuate them back to England, this movie is designed to praise the courage and calmness of the British soldier, as well as the heroism of the British civilian who sailed small boats across the Channel to save them. 300,000+ of them, in fact.
What the movie simply ignores is that while Britain evacuated virtually all of its troops from Dunkirk, they did so at the expense of the French, tens of thousands of whom were left on the beaches to be captured by the Germans and spend four years rotting in POW camps in Germany. At the very end, Kenneth Branaugh's character says that he will stay "to wait for the French," but in fact the British did not. Once they got their own troops out, they stopped the mission.
There were also certain situations that were set up just to milk the audience's emotions, such as the blinding and subsequent death of the young man on the yacht. That, to me, was manipulative.
Overall, however, there is much that is impressive in this movie. It is slick, but impressively so. There's no real depth to it - you know nothing about the characters and don't have any feelings for them - and it doesn't raise any real issues to think about. The most moving moment, by far, is moving only because someone else wrote it: Churchill's great speech about how the British will go on fighting. It makes you realize that nothing else in the movie has that sort of verbal power. If you want this story treated with depth, try Mrs. Miniver. That's manipulative as well, but with far more humanity.
I can't imagine watching this on a TV. It needs a big screen with vibrant color and a great sound system. But if you want to be riveted to your seat for two hours in a movie theater, you could do far worse.