My wife and I went to see the movie "Dunkirk" yesterday. It was an epic story, told as poorly as possible. If you believe the movie, about 30 small ships made their way across the English Channel, watching as every Royal Navy ship was sunk. These 30 small ships pulled 340,000 troops off the beach in one trip. (The movie said 300,000 were evacuated - but that was just one minor inaccuracy in an otherwise inane plot.) Oh, yes, and 3 RAF pilots eliminated the German Air Force (all 5 of them.) All 3 were shot down; the third was able to glide for about an hour (or maybe it just seemed like it) after he ran out of fuel. On a side note, a dozen Brits, including the two fellows who've been on all the talk shows plugging the movie, spent half the movie hiding in an abandoned boat that had washed up on the beach and was being used by the Germans for target practice. I'm not quite sure why they did that, or what happened to them - or maybe I had just quit paying attention or caring by that point. All of this was told in an extremely disjointed manner, with little to no continuity from one scene to the next. There was never any explanation of how the English ended up at Dunkirk in the movie - two minutes of dialog, or a voice-over as arrows moved around on a map, would have helped put the whole thing in perspective.

In truth, this was a 10 day operation, with hundreds of small ships plus 40 destroyers and assorted other navy vessels making multiple crossings of the channel. It was a well-organized withdrawal to the beaches and well-organized evacuation effort pulled together on short notice. The 350,000 troops who were saved went on to battle in North Africa, Sicily, and would eventually return to France in June, 1944. Had they been lost, Britain would have been invaded, and the US would not have had a base from which to invade the continent. This story deserved to be told in the epic manner of "The Battle of Britain", "The Longest Day," or "A Bridge Too Far" (though I'm not sure we have enough talented actors any more to make an "all-star cast" large enough to pull it off.) There was so much to tell here, and the movie missed it all.

The movie sank to the level of "Pearl Harbor" (the one with Ben Affleck, not "Tora, Tora, Tora.") Don't waste your money or your time on it.