It's like "Saving Private Ryan," without the gore or the boring parts, or tedious backstory nonsense. And the heroes don't actually carry guns or shoot anyone with them. There's a beach, and scared guys in uniforms, and it's set within four years...but it's actually nothing like Saving Private Ryan.

It's only about the evacuation from Dunkirk. There are three storylines happening in parallel over the course of the film, with radically different time frames. There are the soldiers on the beach who are waiting hoping for not really expecting at this point, a ride home, whose story takes place over a week, a middle aged boater sailing across the Channel with two kids to help out, over the course of a day, and a couple of Spitfire pilots, over an hour, who fly cover for the evacuation. As the movie progresses, there is a definite sense of the tension ratcheting up and the desperation of the characters growing. Mark Rylance's small boat captain picks up the survivor of ship that got sunk on the way back, whom we see later in the film, but earlier in his own timeline, who is definitely traumatized by his experience, and adds to the pressure with his certainty of doom desperation to flee the war zone rather than return to pick up his comrades. The young soldiers on the beach keep making increasingly desperate attempts to secure their own extraction rather than passively wait for pick up, but each means keeps getting snatched away leading to more and more improbable methods being tried. Hardy's pilot quickly gets his own mission time limit imposed, with an uncertain fuel supply forcing him to make choices that could affect the survival of the other protagonists, against his own (and the meta-certainty that he will be much more greatly needed in the Battle for Britain to come than any of the naval or ground personnel he is trying to save).

I, as a history buff, was never that impressed by Dunkirk in the large scale, because it was an unmitigated disaster, militarily speaking. As Churchill himself noted, "wars are not won by evacuations". Strictly speaking, World War Two as we understand it, is really a misnomer. It was a series of conflicts, that were largely separate. True, they were informed by one another, but then, you might as well call both World Wars the same conflict, as throw the Anglo-Franco-German war of 1939-40 into the same basket as the Russo-American fight against Germany in 1941-45. By any reasonable metric, the UK lost the former fight, getting humiliated on land and sea, and Dunkirk was simply the extraordinary efforts of the people involved trying to survive the aftermath. To the extent that they would come back into the fight, it was as an extension of the US military, largely using US materiel (not least, because they left what was left of their own at Dunkirk). I rolled my eyes at the first teaser trailer I ever saw for this film, and only thought I might see it, because it was Christopher Nolan doing it.

Strip away all the nonsense and sentimentality about this event being relevant to the fight against Nazi Germany, and the movie STILL lands a punch. It's that good, that an Angloskeptic like myself, who leans more toward the Braveheart-The Patriot-Michael Collins-Rob Roy-Last of the Mohicans cinematic approach to history, could be affected by the drawing together of the three narrative threads, as Rylance arrives at the beach, with Hardy flying cover and the infantry kids in the water, just when Kenneth Brannagh's naval officer seems about to give up hope.

I consider this to be one of the best recent WW2 movies, second only maybe to "Hacksaw Ridge".

Some other thoughts:
-- Once again, Tom Hardy is forced to act entirely with his eyeballs in a Nolan film. His character must be a wimp, since the whole time he is in his plane (i.e. the whole time he is in the movie) he never takes off his oxygen mask. Tom Cruise and Will Smith, when flying much faster, much higher-flying jet planes, take theirs off ALL THE TIME! How important could they be in a prop plane, so close to sea level, that no one ever uses a parachute?

-- I forgot to mention above, but the main evacuee soldier is played by Fionn Whitehead. IMDb has his character name as "Tommy" which can be British for "GI Joe". The pilot's name is "Farrier" which is basically a synonym for "Smith" only less complicated. It's kind of fitting that they are so generically named, since we don't get any backstory or internal issues with them. The movie is all about what the characters did. And what they did is enough.

-- There was this one shot halfway through, where Rylance's boat passes a warship heading the other direction. Its decks are covered with soldiers in life jackets, so it's not like they are doing something disgraceful, but the image of a symbol of the world's greatest navy going home, as a tiny motor yacht, crewed by two kids and captained by slender old man dressed for a Sunday drive in the country, heads into danger, was really powerful. For a movie scene without explosions or gunfire, I mean.