I’m not surprised by this, per se. The Dunkirk trailer seemed to be not really into the combat aspects of the event. So hearing from Christopher Nolan that they didn’t really try to push the R envelope makes a certain amount of sense:
This film has been rated PG-13. Was that a choice you made?
All of my big blockbuster films have been PG-13. It’s a rating I feel comfortable working with totally. “Dunkirk” is not a war film. It’s a survival story and, first and foremost, a suspense film. So while there is a high level of intensity to it, it does not necessarily concern itself with the bloody aspects of combat, which have been so well done in so many films. We were really trying to take a different approach and achieve intensity in a different way. I would really like lots of different types of people to get something out of the experience.
Don’t get me wrong: I’d watch a war movie based around Dunkirk. But a suspense film works for me. Not least because there’s no way that all of those men could have been rescued. Write it in a book and people would laugh in your face, and for good reason. And yet, it did all happen that way. This knowledge — the realization that, no matter how bizarre an event looks on the screen, it’s probably a fully-documented part of history — can let you go really out in the weeds when it comes to suspense. I look forward to seeing this movie.
What is forgotten is that, after Dunkirk, a whole bunch of British troops still went into the bag when the French just…collapsed, including the entirety of the Highland Division. Churchill was justifiably furious over that.
I’ve occasionally thought about the Brits who ended up as POWs in France. Those were probably some of the most unlucky guys in the war. The fall of France meant that all of the POWs captured by the Germans up to that point were released… except for the members of the BEF that had been captured. They were prisoners for the duration.
There were worse POW camps (the Japanese camps, and anything related to Eastern Front POWs). But they spent more time than anyone else as prisoners of the Axis.