Actually, another World War Two movie that comes to mind is "The Dirty Dozen" in which a bunch of criminals are formed into a special unit to fight an Axis power. Well this movie is about the bad guy from "Deadpool", the bad guy from "Natural Born Killers", the bad guy from "Footloose"(remake), the bad guy from "Beauty & the Beast", the bad guy from "Aquaman", the bad guy from "The Dark Knight", the bad guy(girl, actually) from "The Princess Diaries", the bad guy from "Glee", the bad guy from "Person of INterest" and the bad guy from "Mapplethorpe" all team up to fight an Axis power. Maybe more. That was all I recognized.

Seriously, though. "Pearl Harbor" was all hyped years ago and supposed to be like, "Saving Private Ryan" but with better SFX. Trying to tap into that same 'Greatest Generation' World War Two myth and at the same time being able to tell a story with unarguable bad guys. Except it was more like "Titanic with Bullets". Because we got fictitious characters shoehorned, and the battle at Pearl Harbor being only a fraction of the thing, because first we had to build up the characters, to make us care about them, then we had to establish the romance, then, we couldn't possibly end the movie on the downer that Pearl Harbor actually WAS, so we had to run the movie forward to the Doolittle raid where one of the heroes actually dies and another one loses his best friend and the female lead loses her child's father. So honestly, the bombing run on Tokyo was more significant to the movie than Pearl Harbor. And a lot of the character conflict had to do with one of them fighting in the Battle of Britain. Pearl Harbor was the least important thing in its own movie. And there were lots of female characters in it because feminism.

There's nothing wrong with women. They're people too. But there are times when you don't need to cast them. Like dramatizations of historical events in which few (no) women were directly involved. You want to give the heroes stakes, give them wives and kids. Like "Midway" does. We just get a few scenes of Mandy Moore missing her husband or telling him to come to her, or making her kid come inside instead of watching the pretty explosions coming from where all those ships are parked. No love triangles, no pregnancy dramas.

We do get Pearl Harbor in this movie, and they pretend to care about some of the crew members, and later on we learn that one of them is a friend of the main character, Dick Best (one of the dive bomber squadron commanders at Midway), so there are stakes, but the appeal there is the amazing sequences of an air raid on Battleship Row. From there, we have the aftermath, as the Americans try to play catch up to the Japanese. We mainly follow the Enterprise and its officers, Best (Ed Skrien), Wade McClusky (Luke Evans), Clarence Dickinson, James Murray and William Halsey (Dennis Quaid), as it sails around the Pacific trying to stop further Japanese offensives. We also get to see the Doolittle raid (with Aaron Eckhart as the eponymous commander) and a little case of "yellow-washing", as he gets rescued by a Chinese guy, instead of the American missionary-turned-intelligence-officer who actually saved Doolittle and his men. During this time, we also get a look at Yamamoto and the Imperial Japanese Navy and are given a quick sketch of the errors at Pearl Harbor, the inter-service politics and rivalry with the Army, and how these issues affect their decision to attack Midway. Meanwhile Admiral Nimitz (Woody Harrelson, doing his best John Slattery impression) and intel officer Ed Layton (Patrick Wilson), are trying to anticipate the next Japanese attack, while being second guessed by Washington, because that worked out so well in December of the previous year.

The movie makes Best into the hero, but really, his actions pretty much deserved it (and he's far more impressive than the fictional exploits of Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett), and they spread the spotlight around. We even get a lot of facial shots of the Japanese sailors manning guns and doing damage control, showing the common humanity. One slightly dubious issue is they come awfully close to showing Best & his rear gunner dog-fighting Japanese fighters. Yeah, no. The American fighters of the time had trouble dog fighting Japanese fighters. Dive bombers didn't have a chance. On the other hand, if you don't come away from this film without a real appreciation for how dangerous flying a plane off a World War Two aircraft carrier was, you're not paying attention.

It's not some deep storytelling or anything, but it's a very good, fast-moving depiction of the early naval war in the Pacific Theater, a fun action film I feel like Michael Bay promised us nearly 20 years ago, by Roland Emmerich has actually delivered. He's forgiven for NOT ACTUALLY"Godzilla" in my book.