Most wasted performance of 2017?

This, no wonder Hamill is pissed off.

the cast of Dunkirk

Performances that were far better than the writing/directing around them:

Rooney Mara, Una
Ben Mendelsohn, Una
Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul
Michelle Pfeiffer, Murder on the Orient Express
Rebecca Ferguson, The Greatest Showman
Oscar Isaac, Suburbicon
Danielle MacDonald, Patti Cake$
Stacy Martin, Le Redoutable
Michael Fassbender, Alien: Covenant

This is so ignorant. Why don't you treat yourself with a re-watch.

going off what Zeb said, the problem with Dunkirk for me is that the technical/visual scope is so beyond the screenplay's depth that it actually dwarfs it and makes it feel insignificant (the best way for me to describe this problem is Biblo's line from LOTR: "like butter spread over too much bread"). It's like Nolan decided he wanted to make a movie about Dunkirk without coming up with a story first, and the result is that his characters feel like single-trait stick figures that only exist to serve Nolan's vision and scope without having any depth or personalities of their own. In my opinion, it should be the other way around. You can only be so impressed with Nolan's technical ambition if there isn't any humanity at its center. If everything just exists to serve that vision, that vision becomes hollow. Dunkirk the battle wasn't about massive shots or superbly-choreographed action pieces. It feels like Dunkirk the movie is.

And I don't buy this nonsense about the film being a harrowing depiction of war. If it is that, it's only in the slightest of terms. The Omaha beach assault in Saving Private Ryan is 100 times more harrowing than anything in Dunkirk, and I didn't even particularly like that film. Even Hacksaw Ridge, despite all its mawkish Jesus imagery to appeal to religious audiences, is a much better representation of the horrors of war. As for Dunkirk's depictions of simple heroism, they are just that: simple, because they don't derive from characters that are substantially developed. They're actions don't mean much if we don't know how much their actions mean for them as individuals. There's no baseline with which to gauge their heroism. It's supposed to be enough that their actions impede the faceless Enemy (the exact same film could have been told beat-for-beat from the German side...that doesn't sit well with me).

To make matters worse, Nolan isn't even content to just let his little characters' actions speak for themselves. He has to weigh down the film in a non-linnear narrative gimmick that felt clever and fresh in Memento but now feels like a crutch. The fact that these three tiny stories actually connect doesn't elevate the film. It reveals just how pathetically limited Nolan's narrative scope really is. This isn't a new thing for Nolan. He's been extraordinarily successful in the past at manipulating audiences into puzzling over structural mush with the expectation that there's something terribly significant, terribly meaningful beneath it. Dunkirk's skeletal screenplay continues that trend of keeping audiences thinking without giving them anything much to think about.