For a teenager today, Dunkirk must seem even more distant than the Boer War did to my generation growing up just after WW2. For some, Christopher Nolan's film may be the most they will know about the event.
But it's enough in some ways because even if it doesn't show everything that happened, maybe it goes as close as a film could to letting you know how it felt.
"Dunkirk" focuses on a number of characters who are inside the event, living it minute by minute.
Tommy, the soldier at the centre of the story, seems at first glance to be the antithesis of the Dunkirk legend. Maybe he fits a New Millennium sensibility rather than a 1940's one, more like a contestant on "Survivor". He does show initiative, but a soldier who throws away his weapon then "helps" wounded to the rear risked a court martial in every army from the Roman Legions on. The lines of stoic soldiers waiting patiently on the beach, the enduring image of the evacuation, seem almost like a backdrop as Tommy and his mate run through them.
The man who embodies the spirit to the full is Dawson, the civilian captain of the Moonstone. He is the sort of man who wins wars; the bloke who sticks to the task when others buckle under pressure; "There's no hiding from this thing son," he says to an officer whose nerve has cracked, all the while steering his little boat towards Dunkirk.
The scenes of aerial combat look so real it makes all other depictions pale in comparison. Peter Jackson once planned to do a remake of "The Dam Busters", but possibly Christopher Nolan would add another dimension to the retelling.
The brilliant special effects serve the story. Much of the panorama of Dunkirk is glimpsed almost incidentally from the cockpit of fighter planes or by men struggling in the water.
There are surprises for anyone who thinks they know the story or have seen documentaries or other recreations of the event; it's very different to the crowded Dunkirk of "Atonement".
An unsettling score helps heighten the tension in a film that has you holding your breath in scene after scene.
This is a film that demands more than one viewing.
