In Mrs Miniver the film had a propaganda even jingoistic elements that inhabited its story and characters.

Dunkirk is a technical masterpiece but the story lacks an emotional core despite having excellent actors such as Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance. At one point I thought where is Hardy?

The film is set in a nonlinear fashion and unlike Saving Private Ryan, director Christopher Nolan has eschewed blood and gore.

Set in 1940 thousands of Allied soldiers have retreated to Dunkirk waiting to be picked up and sailed back to Britain. We focus on Tommy, a young soldier who has survived a German ambush. He meets another young soldier called Gibson on the beach, who is burying a dead body and says little. They try to make their way onto a ship by acting as stretcher bearers and taking a wounded man aboard a hospital ship. We see these two young men just wanting to survive and each time they meet with some unforeseen event.

Dunkirk shows the evacuation from land, sea, and air. Rylance plays a small boat fisherman who along with his son and another young boy are sailing to Dunkirk to pick up survivors. They have already picked one up along the way who is heavily shell shocked. Yet his story is hampered by an appalling side plot of a young man injured and wanting his old school to know that he did something important.

As the film has little dialogue, Nolan wants to create atmosphere and suspense through its visuals and music. In that sense it only partly succeeds because the film lacks dramatic impact.