First let me say that I give this movie top marks for cinematography and how it tells the story strictly from the standpoint of the soldiers on the beach at Dunkirk and the difficulties they faced in escaping the continent for England. Unfortunately at this point the movie loses relevance and goes downhill in a serious way because for any movie depicting events in wartime it is essential that the story be told from the opposing side as well. Christopher Nolan would've been well-advised to watch just about any other film about WW2 from the classics of the 1960s and 1970s up to and including Clint Eastwood's portrayal of events in the Pacific theatre with Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

I believe Nolan's response that portraying the German side of the story as irrelevant today is completely misguided but also a distortion of history in the worst possible way. The fact remains that the Allies were able to escape from Dunkirk ONLY because the Germans halted their advance for a period of 48 hours and yet none of this is depicted in the movie or the conflict that may have existed among the German High Command at such a decision and why it was made. Suffice to say this level of breathing room allowed for the successful evacuation on the scale it occurred and not merely because of a few rickety boats coming across the Channel helmed by sporting yachtsmen who answered the call on behalf of Jolly Old England. Its almost a hagiographic assessment of the British when in fact they themselves saw how doomed they were in the words of Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF who stated "I must not conceal from you that a great part of the BEF and its equipment will inevitably be lost in the best of circumstances". Which it was in point of fact as the amount of material left in Dunkirk took quite some time for the British to resupply and even then only with American assistance.

I really wish I could've given this movie 8 or 9 stars because the potential was there for so much more but shooting it in 70MM film just isn't enough to merit a higher rating in my view when a great deal of the story here was completely omitted. For those unfamiliar with these events in time, and in truth Dunkirk is one of those war stories not frequently told, it serves to inform a younger audience in a misleading manner about what really happened, how and most certainly why.