Review - Dunkirk

'War is hell' is not fresh fodder for the movies. For a hundred years filmmakers have employed the bombastic, enveloping power of cinema to show audiences just how horrible it is to walk a mile in a soldier's boots, from early touchstones like All Quiet on the Western Front to modern incarnations like Hacksaw Ridge.
But seldom is the chaos of combat evoked with such precision and formal exactitude as it is in Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's visceral, artfully disorienting account of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from the eponymous beach in the spring of 1940.

The 'Miracle of Dunkirk' is considered a linchpin moment of the second World War – A sort of psychological victory salvaged from an untenable military fiasco in France. Some 400 000 British, French and Belgian men found themselves stranded at the tiny port town of Dunkerque while the German noose tightened around them, waiting to be ferried across the English Channel to safety. The fact that so many of them lived to fight another day became an early cornerstone of the war effort, preserving Britain's might and boosting her morale.

At least, that's how history (having been written by the victors) remembers it.