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Notes -
Have you seen Saving Private Ryan? When I watched Dunkirk all I could think was that it was Nolan directing a PG-13 Ryan knockoff.
TBH there are only like three good scenes in the whole movie. The D-Day scene gives the impression that the film is going to be a gritty, morally-grey story about how war is a pointless, hellish slaughter. However, it quickly pivots to an all-too-typical morality play of good guys vs. faceless evil Germans. The only part of the film that humanizes the Germans in any way - the arc with Steamboat Willie - ends up being a story of how treating a Nazi mercifully was a blunder with horrible consequences.
I think the film squanders an opportunity to tell a genuinely interesting story about how the war was a ghoulishly unnecessary waste of millions of the best young men that the West had to offer. However, that is clearly not the story Spielberg wanted to tell; nor, frankly, is it a story America would have wanted to hear, so I can’t blame Spielberg any more than I would have blamed any other director.
Everyone says "the first half-hour is incredible, then it becomes corny patriotic schlock". I disagree: I think the film does an admirable job of sustaining the intensity of its opening throughout the subsequent battle scenes, which are almost as gripping and jarring as those in the opening, and which set the tone for how action films would look, sound and feel for decades afterwards.
On the contrary, I think the film did tell this story. Consider the conversation between Miller and Horvath in the church, in which Miller says that throughout his military career, he was able to rationally justify all the lives lost under his command with the reasoning that more lives have been saved as a result. But for this particular mission, he cannot employ that reasoning: many men must die to save the life of one, and the only way the sacrifice will be worth it is if Ryan "invent[s] a longer-lasting lightbulb or something". Ryan's closing dialogue indicates that he's spent more or less his entire adult life burdened with the knowledge that he's only alive because several men gave their lives to save his, as a public relations mission, and wondering if he has done enough with his time on earth to warrant the sacrifice. Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does. It may not be Joseph Heller but it's a far more disquieting and confrontational message than the movie is generally credited with. (Not to mention the fact that the film's viewpoint character for the back half is a coward who allows his squadmate to die because he's paralysed by terror, and who is clearly intended to represent how the typical audience member would behave in such a situation.)
Yes, Spielberg acknowledges that at least some of the American lives lost during the war were thrown away for cynical and arbitrary reasons, and that this is unspeakably tragic.
What he is unwilling to acknowledge is that the deaths of those German boys were also equally tragic and unnecessary.
I’m not willing to call the film “corny patriotic schlock”. It is an incredibly masterful film, and I agree with you that the battle scenes are thrillingly intense. However, you’re also correct that the film influenced battle scenes that came after it, and I don’t think this influence is wholly positive. Throughout the film, the Germans are almost universally treated as faceless foes, who die bloodlessly and instantaneously when shot. In contrast, American casualties writhe in pain, spurt blood everywhere, and cry for their mothers. It’s very affecting and humanizing, but it’s never applied to the Germans. There’s a YouTuber who does great analysis of this aspect of the film. The Germans can be mowed down without inspiring sympathy, because they are just villainous mooks.
This is not an anti-war film, and certainly not an anti-WWII film. It’s just an acknowledgement of how utterly horrible the sacrifices were that American soldiers needed to make in order to save the world from an unambiguously evil force of insane, feral monsters vaguely resembling human beings. It doesn’t ask you to stop and wonder whether the German soldiers felt the same way, let alone whether they would be correct in thinking so.
I just don't think the film is anywhere near as one-sided or morally black-and-white as you're making out. The German sniper in the clock tower has the opportunity to shoot Caparzo, but refrains from doing so until Caparzo returns the little French girl to her parents, presumably for fear of her getting hit in the crossfire. After killing Mellish in a vicious hand-to-hand mêlée, the unnamed German soldier can't bring himself to kill the cowering, snivelling Upham who clearly poses no threat. Perhaps we aren't strictly invited to sympathise with Steamboat Willie when he's pathetically sobbing and begging for his life, but I think we are at least invited to understand Upham's reluctance to kill a POW in cold blood. If Miller's squad had executed him, it would have been just one of several war crimes the Rangers are depicted committing: I don't think the audience is expected to cheer at their decision to shoot surrendering Czech conscripts at Omaha, or needlessly prolonging the deaths of several German soldiers by allowing them to burn to death rather than quickly finishing them off.
Of course the American soldiers are our viewpoint characters and we are intended to sympathise with them (because, duh, the Allies just were more sympathetic than the Germans), but I don't think the film can honestly be said to depict the German soldiers as a formless mass of interchangeable faceless monsters, nor the American soldiers as stalwart, wholly morally upstanding heroes who never put a foot wrong.
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I have, in saving private ryan, the cinematic scenes are in the beginning whereas in this one, they are spread throughout. For me that makes this more rewatachable, that too is a great movie, worth rewatching so good point.
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