Good movie, but wasted opportunity

Rating: 7/10 (13 February 2018)

I had high hopes for this movie, but was ultimately left a little disappointed.
Everyone knows the Dunkirk story, and how the steely determination of a nation helped rescue hundreds of thousands of stranded soldiers from the beaches of France. As Churchill noted, it was a miraculous escape, but wars aren't won with evacuations.
Anyhow, the movie was well acted, and well-enough made, but it felt as though they didn't really convey the true scale of the evacuation. Some 800 boats were used to transfer more than 300,000 soldiers from France to the U.K., so surely the English Channel should've been filled with boats. The movie just seemed to focus on a few boats, and a few soldiers, and it didn't do a particularly great job of illustrating the true scale of the evacuation. It was almost as though they were trying to save money by not having to recreate the scene.
One thing I did like though was that there didn't seem to be a "star" of the movie. There were many well-known faces, including Kenneth Branagh, Cilian Murphy, Harry Styles (who was actually not bad) and others. But they all had relatively small parts, and clearly weren't brought in to "Hollywood-ize" the movie, which was a good thing. It wanted to focus on the story rather than the famous names playing the roles.
Ultimately though, the story was a little disjointed, and it could've been told much better. I can't quite fathom why this has an 8+ rating on IMDB, it's more of a 6.8 IMHO.