Admittedly, telling a story of such magnitude must be difficult in approximately a two hour time frame, but for some reason this movie never quite got the emotional buy-in that I had been hoping for.

I never felt the sense of doom and danger that certainly would have been present, and if this could have been conveyed it would have made the movie much more powerful and intense. I guess I wanted to try experience what they were going through, like we did in "Saving Private Ryan", but those feelings and the stress never really materializes in this movie.

Unfortunately, other than the individual captain of a private boat we don't really get to know anything about the main characters of the film which does little to build the emotions and character involvement that would have made this a great film.

Additionally, the true scope of what took place does not seem to be reflected in the visual nature of the film. I don't know if it was due to budgetary constraints, but it did not appear that there were over 300,000 stranded soldiers on the beaches desperately waiting to be rescued, nor did it seem like there were enough civilian boats available to make this transportation possible. The whole scale of things simply did not add up. The sheer amount of humanity must have created numerous real life issues and this was never addressed. Things were too orderly, controlled, and frankly, clean.

Overall, it is a decent movie but I fail to see how it is being rated as high as 8.5.