I think the Jaws comparison goes even further – for me, Dunkirk was a disaster/ monster movie with the machinery of war as the monster.
You don’t see a single opponent, and characters are only attacked by disembodied weaponry. The overwhelming walls of noise are as evocative of the Jurassic Park T-Rex as anything else.
This is the machinery of war, threatening to chew up our heroes if they put one foot wrong. It’s an undefeatable certain doom, lurking two steps behind.
It’s almost like the possibility of a parallel universe, where the Allies only escape with 30k men, and the war takes a different route, trying to infringe on the reality of the film.
Having this film in my mind raises the stakes of every other film about the war that comes after it. Not in terms of spectacle or craft – but because it hits home how desperate the event was, and how close we came to genuinely losing everything.
It’s not an experience I want to return to again soon, because I think it will stay vivid in my mind for some time to come.

