Kind of a mess

Rating: 5/10 (11 November 2019)

Roland Emmerich is not a name that inspires much faith for historical accuracy, but hey the Patriot was at least entertaining.
This is not the Patriot.
I noticed they were getting details wrong so I turned my brain off and just tried to enjoy the movie as a movie. That didn't go very well because it's not very good as a movie either.
I don't know who thought it was a good idea to have one movie cover about seven months of history, but they need to be fired. This movie condenses the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the aftermath, the Raid on the Marshal Islands, the Doolittle Raid, the Battle of Coral Sea, and the Battle of Midway into one movie.
I know who these guys are, however the audience must be so confused as characters come and go with maybe a few minutes of screen time. Take the Pearl Harbor scene, we get this officer telling an enlisted sailor to set up deck chairs for the Sunday church service. The enlisted sailor says he's an atheist and I rolled my eyes figuring this kid will be a secondary characters learning about faith and god and stuff.... I was giving the movie too much credit. After the Attack on Pearl Harbor he has one more scene. You see it was the officer that was important because he was close friends with Lt. Cmd Dick Best, our main character and he needed to ask the kid what happened to his friend.
Then the whole second act is basically everything that happened between Pearl Harbor and Midway, (that's December 1941 to June 1942). They have Admiral Halsey in this movie for some reason as a secondary character which was probably not a good idea because Halsey wasn't at Midway so I'm wondering why are we spending time with a character who won't matter in the freaking climax and leaving people don't know this wondering why this Admiral Spruance is joining us this late in the movie.
It just goes on like this for 2 hours.
Things I did like was the sound design and I really enjoyed seeing the CGI renditions of the real ships. I liked that I could look at ships and actually identify them by class. The battles mostly look fine, but I have problems with Pearl Harbor (but that's mostly nitpicking)... though the CGI during that scene did look odd. The acting was also fine, eventually I got used to some of the cheesy 1940s accents the actors were using.
I don't hate this movie but if you know nothing about World War II this movie will not be fun because you'll be very confused. If you do know a lot about World War II you still won't like it because they abridge so many important events and people.
Go see the 1970s version, it was a tighter and more accurate film.