I kept not walking out because I kept wrongly thinking it was about to end anyway...

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2018)

This movie was such a disappointment. I heard how great it was. I loved many of the actors. I like war movies. So I went. But this movie was just a terrible mish-mash that was too hard to follow.
First of all, it was too hard keep the characters straight--too many of the actors resembled each other. Except for the very recognizable actors such as Clooney and Nolte, what you got was a bunch of reasonably good-looking white men with brown hair--all dressed as soldiers, sometimes in dimly lit scenes, such as in the rain or the forest or on a cloudy day or in a fuzzy flashback. Thus it was hard to know whose flashback was whose and which battle was which. Filmmaking 101: enable the audience to tell the difference between your characters. It's totally doable: Stone did it in Platoon, Kubrick did it in Full Metal Jacket, and Jewison did it in a Soldier's Story despite all of the characters basically wearing the same uniform.
Second, it was way too long. The two friends I went with (and convinced to see it given so many positive critic's reviews) soon enough wanted to walk out, and I said, "wait this must be the climax, the final battle scene," so I convinced them to stay. A short time later, they said to me, "it wasn't the final and it hasn't gotten better, so let's go." I again said, "wait, it's the final battle scene, let's just wait." After convincing them to stay a second time, the film still refused to end. Finally, they said, "we're leaving with or without you because this film sucks." I couldn't disagree that it sucked, so I walked out with them. The plotting was confused there was no end in sight. Yet, not five minutes later, after we had all made stops in the bathrooms and were in the theatre lobby discussing what to do next that evening, the film finally ended as the crowd poured into the lobby. Frankly, my telling of watching the movie was more interesting than the movie. To this day, I can't figure out why someone would put so many apparently climactic battle scenes in one movie, but I refuse to watch it again to find out.
In sum: it was hard to tell the actors apart, which made it hard to follow the plot; pointless flashbacks; went on way too long. A film that was in love with itself, and the critics refused to admit the emperor had no clothes.
See it only if you like form over substance, visuals over storytelling.