A WWII Story Told In Christopher Nolan Style

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2017)

As you scroll through the other reviews for this film on IMDb and see some of the reviews rave and complain, you'll notice the common elements. Acting, story, etc. While my review does not contain spoilers (necessarily), if you want to go in completely blind about how the film portrays the Dunkirk, maybe stop reading.
Dunkirk is a World War II film told in Christopher Nolan's signature style of temporal irregularities through his storytelling and editing. We've seen him play around with time in his previous films, most notably Memento, Interstellar, Inception, and, to an extent, even Batman Begins. It's in Christopher Nolan's artistic vision of time that helps him tell his compelling stories. Memento's reverse order of storytelling lets the audience feel what it's like to live with the protagonist's inability to form new memories. Inception's layers of dreams (with different time frames) allows the film to align climaxes at different points of each dream. And the latter is what Dunkirk roughly does.
Dunkirk tells the stories of the battle by land, sea, and air, with the events in each setting taking place within a week, a day, and an hour, respectively. Nolan ingeniously crafts these three stories together, weaving their different time frames to align climaxes within the battles and emphasize their individual struggles. The result is a beautiful portrayal that encompasses the entire battle on all three aspects.
I see many complain about the lack of character development in this film, and how the characters aren't that memorable; to be honest, I agree. I couldn't even name the characters if I could. But that's the point! Dunkirk is not a story about a single individual, or a particular group of people. It's about a struggle a community faced, and that there were no individual standout heroes in this war, just many who collaborated together. Even though the film is centered on the evacuation of Dunkirk, it emulates the sentiments of the entire war as a whole.
Hans Zimmer collaborated with Benjamin Wallfisch on the score for this film, focusing on emulating and modernizing British classical music, most notably Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations. The result is a colorful, wistful score that draws out unique themes for each aspect of the battle and sonically blends them together as the stories weave in and out of each other. Huge fan of Wallfisch's orchestrations that use the strings to swell and evoke an echoic atmosphere for the film.
While it may be too late at this point, I highly recommend seeing this film in 70mm or 70mm-IMAX formats. The colors in the film are gorgeous, and watching this film on an analog format emphasizes the vast scope of the war and the colorful vision that Nolan aspired for.