If you're going to make a film about a major historical event, there are two obvious ways of playing it. One is the near docu-drama route, trying to convey the big picture; another is to craft a more focused, fictional narrative within the wider setting. It's not my favourite film by any means, but you can see Steven Spielberg trying to do both in 'Saving Private Ryan' in a film of two halves. But I don't really understand what Christopher Nolan is trying to do in his movie about the Dunkirk evacuation. The wider picture is hardly presented; but the individual stories he crafts are so fragmented that there's little in the way of narrative drive either. There are other choices he makes which seem strange to me: a confused chronology with day and night alternating seemingly arbitrarily, an emphasis on a near-mythological portrayal of Englishness, and ultra-minimal dialogue. Strangest of all is the sense of space in the movie: when you fly over the Dover Straits, you can see (in normal times) numerous boats between the cliffs on either side; but here we see isolated boats and planes as if they were adrift in or over the Pacific Ocean, while armies of well behaved soldiers magically materialise on a previously prestine Dunkirk beach. Right at the end of the film, Nolan uses Churchill's most famous speech (delivered after the evacuation) to good effect; but overall it's a muted affair, neither particularly educational nor dramatic.