I had gone to see Dunkirk in a crowded theater in Gallery Place near the dead center of Washington, D.C. I had gone with some friends from a history site that we collectively frequent and as such I felt it would be the best crowd to go see it with.

I had tried to avoid everything about it going in, beyond simply knowing the history. I am a tremendous history nerd (as attending a historical film with fellow history nerds may attest to) I knew the basics of the Dunkirk evacuation, and the tremendous effort it took to evacuate thousands of people to Britain, away from the Nazi war machine.

Immediately, you are thrown into a desperate situation, a shootout in Dunkirk proper. He flees to the beach, where the soldiers are being prepared to be sent to England, where the arduous task of defending Britain from the seemingly impending Sealion will begin.

I had heard the grainy recordings of Stuka sirens on YouTube, but it had never occurred to me what they must have sounded like in person. Christopher Nolan gave me an answer. As the German dive-bombers came careening towards the ground, the sirens mounted on them gave out a banshee’s scream that terrified me to the marrow. It is as if I could hear the screams of the innocent of Coventry and Rotterdam in those sirens, the primal fear of outright obliteration coming right towards me.

Those sirens served as a potent metaphor for the rest of the movie. It gave a more human face to the evacuation, and indeed to the war. I read about the war in books and on the internet, and recreated some battles in PC games, and seen it movies albeit with stylization. Dunkirk felt more real and felt more human.

Criticism has been levied at this film for a lack of character development, or lack of interesting character arcs. I would counter that Dunkirk is not a traditional narrative film. More than anything else, Dunkirk is in the business of relaying an experience: that of the terror of industrial warfare. It is a film that is sparse and that is determined to show rather than to tell. Dialogue is infrequent and done only when necessary, for effect, particularly for the fate of Gibson, or the situation on Mr. Dawson’s boat.

It is no small feat that the triumphant arrival of civilian boats to Dunkirk is done with so little dialogue, but nevertheless Nolan made it work. I don’t want to reveal too much, but I will say it is well worth your money if you want a new type of war movie, one that is determined to put you there in the middle of history’s deadliest conflict.