You gotta be better at criticism. You're just kind of repeating "I didn't like it" over and over again. If you're afraid of spoilers, don't be. This is based on a historical event that everyone should probably have known about.
I'm not that bad at criticism. Part of what makes this movie hard to criticize is that it's not really a movie. You can't criticize character choices because we don't get to know the narrative or the characters that way, stuff just happens and they react, this plays exactly like a 3rd act of a bigger movie and that should be enough evidence to clearly explain why it's bad.
This movie is just a 3rd act and that is why it is a bad movie. It is missing 2/3rds of what makes a movie a movie.
It sounds like you were expecting a traditional war movie and you didn't get it. Which only makes me want to see it more. Saying this as a fan, the World War 2 genre of films has been on recycle since Saving Private Ryan. It is quite difficult to tell a story that says anything new about that conflict. I think the last serious one that did this was Letters of Iwo Jima, which was interesting in that it portrayed the Japanese side of the conflict (which was never really done by a mainstream American film before). Inglorious Basterds also qualifies for just being so stylistically different than any other World War 2 film (although this is more of a Tarantino film).
Also Nolan has never really been good with the characters in his films. I still like his movies overall, he exists in a interesting space between being Stanley Kubrick and Michael Bay, but the fact that you say the characters in the movie are non-existent only makes me more curious to watch it. Because this is typically a weakness of other WW2 films too, its tendency to have weak or stock characters that simplify a massive conflict to a personal story.
"never been good with characters" / "created one of the most compelling on screen villains of all time"
Pick one
To the rest of what you said: I am not complaing that it is a non-traditional war movie. I'm complaining that it's not a movie. It is a 3rd act of a bigger movie, and movies have acts 1 and 2 because we need to care about what's going on which won't happen if you only have a 3rd act.
Without a 1st/2nd act the movie is inert.
I don't like cliches, I don't have a problem with a movie being different. I have a problem with a movie being not a movie, which this one was. ---
