Incredible Film, Wrongly Criticised

Rating: 9/10 (12 September 2017)

Christopher Nolan has created yet another massive hit, however this time his film does not concern memory loss, Batman, dreams or black holes. This film concerns the real evacuation of over 300,000 soldiers at Dunkirk during the second world war.
Nolan is absolutely correct when saying this is an event film, and this film does an amazing job at making the viewer feel the stress and terror of being killed at a moments notice.
Nolan also manages to make do without blunt exposition, which have unfortunately plagued some of his works in the past, mainly Inception. The only piece of exposition that I noticed in the film was visual, the propaganda posters dropped onto the ally soldiers. And this exposition works perfectly for telling the audience (who may not know of the events) essentially what's happening.
This film uses a very unique structure, not unlike Pulp Fiction, where Nolan shows a number of scenes that are happening at different times, and over the course of different periods. This structure has unfortunately threw some people off, who found it distracting and/or didn't see the need for it. There is a simple answer to this of course, and it is answered in the film. Everything on the beach happens over the course of a week, everything in the civilian boats happens over the course of a day, and everything in the air happens over the course of an hour. I don't quite understand how people misunderstood this or found it distracting, and I do not believe it's the film, or the director's fault for this misunderstanding, as most people, including myself, understood it perfectly.
Another criticism this film has unfairly been given is it's lack of interesting characters. Unfortunately, not every soldier has an investing backstory to sob over, and spend an unnecessary amount of screen time addressing, as a very large majority of these soldiers were just men, men trying to survive and get home safe. Which is all I think was actually needed to care about the characters in the film.