First Nolar oscar confirmed.

Maybe it is being a history fan, but knowing about Dunkirk and seeing that moment in time on screen is exciting to me.  The dread and scramble in the uncertainty.  It's not a war storey, more of a survival storey.

Since when does RottenTomatoe like anything? They take scores of other sites and all they do is counting every score above a 60 as fresh and below 60 as rotten. And when 95% of all reviews had a score of above 60, then it has a 95% score which only tells us that 95% were minimum a 60.

And if a movie does get 100 reviews of whom 10 are a 0-59 and 90 are a 60, then it will get a 90% even when the highest single score was a 60 and the average score a 50 or something. 

That's pretty much the whole system of RT, counting what is below or above 60. 

The Miracle at Dunkirk was the evacuation of a significant portion of the combined Allied forces (primarily a significant portion of the British Expeditionary Force) from the beaches and port of Dunkirk, France.  After the Battle of France quickly turned into a disaster, over 400,000 men were forced to retreat to Dunkirk and were surrounded by a much larger and more potent German force.  Evacuation was decided as the only chance the army had to survive, but it was a huge race against time as the Luftwaffe constantly harrassed the troops and the German forces slowly closed in.  The evacuation involved quite literally every boat that could cross the channel in time to help, including everything from destroyers to dingies, yachts, and fishing boats.  Had the evacuation failed and that army have been destroyed, Britain would have been left extremely vulnerable and the odds of the later counter offensive being a success would have been hugely diminished.  It is an incredibly tense moment in modern history, hence the emphasis on the ticking clock sound in the trailers. 

It would hold the most significance to the British and French I suppose.  I'm a history buff so there's that.  Plus, it wasn't a victory, and we all know great victories and great defeats are the most often retold stories. 

I went to see it, and I liked it. But I don't think it was something so... great. I mean, it must be my least favourite Nolan film, so I've been expecting way more of it. It was reeeeally boring at times. But I must say that there are some scenes which are insanely intense and nerve-wracking. 7/10 would be my score. I think it's really overrated, and I'm saying this as a self-declared Nolan fan.

Wonder if this will be the response of many Nolan fans.  From all descriptions it's way outside his usual comfort zone, since Nolan is very much a theme-centered writer with a focus on dialogue character development paired with excellent cinematography, and only 1 of those 3 seems to be in Dunkirk.

I'll probably like it a lot as not only a Nolan guy but more importantly a big fan of old school war films. 

Silver lining... maybe he dies?

This is an extremely overrated movie in my opinion. It's certainly a step up from Nolan's last couple of misfires, but by no means a great movie. It has a bunch of problems.
The most prominent is the exagerated sound design and soundtrack that rapes the audience's ears, even when nothing dramatic is going on. It's clearly designed to create tension, but it only succeeds in being exhausting and distracting.
The other major problem is the lack of strong character development, there are charaters who meet the bare minimum for becoming slightly interesting (for instance Mark Rylance) and then there are characters that miss the mark completely, like Tom Hardy's character, who never becomes more than a guy sitting in an airplane, shooting at other airplanes.

The movie receives points for having an emotional core, strong cinematography, sparse dialogue and a more simple premise than Nolan's more overblown efforts.

6/10

It's definitely different from anything I've seen from him, that's for sure. But it's also different from any war movie I've seen. It's an almost silent movie at times, with almost no dialogue through the movie. It's really beautifully directed and the score is fantastic, adding to the tension. But I was really bored at times, there were a lot of long shots where almost anything happens. I hate that in films. If the movie was half an hour shorter, I'd probably enjoy it way more.