Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

jimel98 I was flipping channels and came across this dreck a little less than 1/2 way through. I started to watch and within seconds found myself saying, "How did that...?" " When did....?" "That's not right." "I'm not genius or expert, but WHAT THE....?" and so forth.VERY few of the actors looked much like their characters as if the casting director simply said, "If they're white and male, feh, it works. Oh, but put a pair of glasses on that guy."As other reviews have mentioned, poetic license is to be expected to some degree and honestly, with that much of a timespan to cover and all that material, one has to be realistic enough to know that you can't include every detail or you'd end up with a movie almost as long as the war itself. It's just not going to happen. But with that in mind, isn't it in everyone's best interest to get what you ARE covering more than a LITTLE right?The History Channel has become a joke. What was once one of the most fascinating and informative channels for us history buffs has become a hodgepodge of reality crap shows. It's heartbreaking, but my anti-TV executive rants are common in my reviews, so, here's more evidence to back up my beliefs. When they DO an actual history show, I guess we shouldn't expect much more from them than this. And this stinker is now 4 years old. Sheesh, now I'm starting to cry.

edgewood001 1) They compressed 30 years of history into 4 and a half hours. Things will get left out doing so. 2) This was never intended to be a doctorate-level course in European and American History. 3) It was entertainment! GOOD entertainment. Churchill's speech in Part II actually made me sit up a little straighter and sent chills down my spine. 4) Yes, there were equipment and armament inaccuracies. They also had a little thing called a BUDGET, keep that in mind that it wasn't an infinite one. 5) If you sat down to watch this with a checklist of every single event of World War I and II, you are missing the point. It painted the broad strokes very well. If it can get even ONE person interested in learning more about that era, then the producers did their job as far as I am concerned.

Zach Hiatt This mini-series has a lot of great narration and historical facts. I will give it that much. The first scene really draws you in with Adolph Hitler and the First World War, but that is just about as good as it gets theatrical wise. Everything after that tends to slope constantly. The re-enactments were the most pathetic I've ever seen. Multiple times a ship would be sailing in the ocean with either a British, American, Nazi, and Japanese flag attached to the rear. Each time the ship was the exact same and it had a helipad and satellite dishes all over the main section. Multiple times American Marines from the Pacific theater were show as Italian, French, or Polish soldiers. Half of the time Hitler would speak short sentences in German with subtitles, but when there were full dialogued scenes, he would speak in English. Many scenes with Patton as a Junior officer referred to him as a Captain pre World War I, then as a Lieutenant post World War I while wearing Lieutenant Colonel Silver Oak Leafs. It was a poor representation of the uniform in my respect.

Christopher Heselton This "documentary" leans more towards a fictional alternative universe that conforms with some US-centric narrative, because it is rife with inaccuracies and seems to think that the US mattered more in these wars than any other country. As a historian of East Asia, I can down-right say that nearly everything said about Japan was inaccurate. These were not nit-picky mistakes. For example, in episode 2, the narrator claims that:"In 1937, the Emperor of Japan approves an invasion of Northeastern China. A dedicated soldier is chosen to lead the troops. His name is Hideki Tojo. … After overseeing a series of successful battles, Tojo is names Japan's Minister of War and is now responsible for the state of the Japanese military."I don't know where to begin: 1) The Japanese invasion of Northeastern China (Manchuria) was on September 18, 1931 and was completed by 1933. It was not July 7, 1937 as they stated. July 7, 1937 is the date of the Marco Polo Bridge incident, a bridge just outside Beijing (just down the street from where I live) where a small clash between a Chinese warlord and the Japanese Imperial Army occurred and quickly grew into a total-war between China and Japan. It is generally taken as the beginning of World War II in China.2) The Japanese emperor never approved of any invasion of northeastern China. The consensus is that the invasion was begun unapproved by anyone in the central government, and instead was undertaken by renegade officers in the colonial (not imperial) Kwantung Army – particularly Seishiro Itagaki and Kanji Ishiwara – and then taken further by Shigeru Honjo. In fact, the Minister of War, Jiro Minami, was trying to have Seishiro removed fearful that he would provoke a conflict. Once the invasion begun, however, the invasion proved to be popular with the public and politicians didn't want to admit they couldn't control their own officers, so they retroactively (many months later) approved. 3) Hideki Tojo wasn't involved in the invasion of Northeastern China at all. He was a colonel in the 1st Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army, which didn't see action then. It wasn't until 1935 he served as a Kempeitai officer in Manchukuo (the puppet state set up by the Japanese in northeastern China). The invasion of Manchuria was run by several officers, but Shigeru Honjo probably did more. Since there was no central plan, no one really was in control, so no one was leading it. It was often mid-ranking officers taking the initiative to gain promotions and celebrity status in the media – in fact, the central government was trying to contain the conflict.4) Tojo wasn't made the Minister of War until 1940, and of course he was Prime Minister a year later.These are mistakes that could be revealed with simple checks on Wikipedia. My undergraduate students do a better job than this on their mid-term papers, which shows the un-professional quality of the writing of this film.Not to mention: Why are John McCain, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney doing on a "history" program? They don't seem very knowledgeable on the subject. As far as I know, they didn't serve in any positions of leadership or witness any of the events they comment on. It also seems odd (and suspicious) that they only have these right-wing politicians – granted I don't think there are any politicians in a position to really be able to comment on this. You'd get just as accurate a response by pulling a random stranger off the street.