I did not realize until seeing DUNKIRK that WWII was fought entirely by male models from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Nor that its commanders (like Kenneth Branagh) mostly stood around posing with binoculars, mouthing pieties through clenched jaws. Nor that this event, which in real life was about the boredom of 300,000 soldiers waiting nine days for evacuation, was instead a nonstop series of cliffhangers each a variation on the just-in-time-reprieve-from-a-rising-water-level-in-a-confined-space cliché. And that none of these squeakers contained even one ounce of drama (except stiff-upper-lip platitudes from Mark Rylance’s English everyman, and Churchill’s oddly out-of-place “we will fight them on the beaches” voice-over at the end).

Much of this film, with its mosquito-bomber action, resembles Wings minus that film’s human component. No doubt a milestone of digital spectacle (even though shot, for no reason, in 70mm), it is nevertheless a bore in less than two hours. The most unforgivable feature is a truly obnoxious wall-to-wall “sound-design” score by Hans Zimmer, basically one long factory drone gradually rising in pitch as the film wears on, making even this film’s few lines unintelligible. This recent innovation in film-music (now also de rigeur for straight dramas on cable TV) is meant to add a minimalist veneer of modern “irony,” so pervasive today that it will soon render these films as dated as Philip Glass muzak.

Good luck with that 96 Metacritic score. I’ll bet this “important” film is forgotten by Oscar time.