Wow, a comic book action about war

Rating: 6/10 (6 February 2020)

Roland Emmerich, ladies and gentlemen.
I knew what to expect from him but still am quite impressed. I mean, he only does relatively big budget huge in scale nonsense films with little to no story split between 20-25 characters (and re-using them, I felt sad this film had no smug and sleazy supposedly Jewish lawyer stereotype).
And this film is no different except for one important thing - real people are being portrayed.
The film has two major issues. The first one is expected - the story is a mess and the pacing is all over the place. The film jumps around places and characters, half of which get nearly not enough screen time to make them memorable. All the dialogue is either cliche heroism motivation speeches or 100% unrefined exposition, when a character says literally the key note you have to be getting out of that scene, since it's so bad its incomprehensible without an explanation. It just follows the pattern - action scene->nonsensical dialogue->exposition. After a couple of iterations the film ends and we are told some backstory about the real people that were shown in the film, and it just makes you wonder how good would it be if they had actual real characters with emotions and motivations besides "that one guy we didn't know anything about who died in the first 5 minutes made him really angry". They could've written this in a way to provide great service to the real people portrayed in this, who did their best and acted selflessly, but they didn't bother. So all of our "characters" are mostly cardboard cut-outs who are more shallow than modern comic book superheroes. It was nice to see real pictures in the end, but please, have some respect. I would never care if an overblown action film had badly written characters but these are real people.
The second issue is the look of the film. The lighting and the color correction is probably intentional and is done to reference some sort of style (and the poster too). So it feels like they wanted it to look this way. But the horrible green screens and composite shots really hurt this film. Roland Emmerich actually made me feel like I'm watching a Star Wars prequel, you know, with full CGI backdrops that never look realistic or believable. Some of the CGI shots also felt like a modern video-game cutscene. It looked too bright, too polished and new for a war film. I mean yeah, Dunkirk also looked stylized, but Nolan was actually able to present three different timeFLOWS, not even timelines. So don't get me started on this one (and the budgets are comparable). I haven't seen this in a theater but my home setup is sufficient to enjoy a good picture with surround sound, and I mostly laughed at the dialogue or felt bored during CGI battles.

P.S. I also want to commend most of the actors for giving a good performance even given the bad script, except for Ed Skrein, he was clearly cast only for the looks and he felt confused on what he is trying to deliver throughout the film.
P.P.S. Also, the way the Japanese are portrayed at first comes as a bit of a surprise, but when you check the production companies and the markets this film was aimed for (mostly Chinese audiences) it all makes sense. I mean, I'm not going to talk about propaganda and conspiracy theories, but a thinking person will understand what I mean with a single viewing.