More like a documentary than a dramatic film

Rating: 5/10 (23 July 2017)

Not too much I liked about this film. Emotionless story for the most part, with mostly repetitive bombing and killing and a soundtrack that was deafening and unrelenting. The film's color was also washed out which bled any potential emotion from it. Character development was non-existent. Mostly scenes of scared to death young men trying to survive.
Didn't like at all the 3 stories in one gimmicky approach to this important historical event. Scenes constantly jumped from one of the 3 stories to the another with no relationship to the last scene shown, only to the last scene of the same story shown earlier. Also, too much repetition and different angles of air attacks, with soldiers constantly in the water from bombings and too little of anything else that made Dunkirk the historical war icon that it is known to be. For example, in one scene it was disheartening and historically inaccurate to show one destroyer that didn't even fire a shot at a bomber that sunk it even as the plane was clearly visible from miles off. And, the many plane dog fights were too repetitive and did not look realistic for the most part. There were also too many scenes that looked "off" in historical accuracy to me, one example being the one of soldiers in an abandoned boat on the beach, being shot at by an unseen shooter, but none of the soldiers were killed or even hit by the many bullets that pierced the boat's sides. Not one.
The entire story and editing of the film annoyed me to the point that I ended up not caring much what happened at the end. That is never a good thing in a war movie. The different time lines of the 3 stories were more than disorienting at times as the film cut from story to story and back again, with all time in each......suspended.
If this famous filmmaker wanted to make a documentary, he should have made one. What was missing was a dramatic movie. To me, bad form to mix the two but keep an emotion-starved, washed-out color, documentary style story throughout. This story could have been told and shown a lot better.