This movie is hella boring FACT.
The only worth wild thing about this movie is the planes and dogfights, they are excellent.
This movie is also the sequel to the game Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces. It's just an air combat game, the important part to understanding the movie is that these characters are all clones(aka NPCs you shoot down in the game). When they die they are replaced by an exact duplicate who restarts the cycle all over again. The antagonist is the player of the game aka you, and in the opening scenes you are killing the NPCs under the alias of "The Teacher" whom the NPCs can never hope to match or beat "The Teacher" and they die then in a way they "respawn." The rest of the movie is inconsequential as it's just the NPCs who basically have no emotion because they are NPCs living the day-to-day life of an NPC doing whatever and then getting killed by you "The Teacher", the respawning while almost no one seems to care as they have been through the cycle so many times they can no longer feel the emotions of losing someone.
By the time you learn this in the movie, it's the 1-hour 30-minute mark and you've fallen asleep, given up watching, or are on your third sitting trying to get through this slog of a movie. Fuck the movie honestly don't watch it, go to YouTube and watch all the dogfights and call it a day.
There are no characters in this movie period. The only ones who display any kind of emotion are treated as secondary characters with no screen time.
The music is bland and forgettable just like the NPCs themselves which is why it is that way to emphasize just how boring it is to be an NPC. Voice acting is dead on arrival, in the cockpit, they always speak English and on the ground Japanese both of which are delivered calmly and with no emoting or passion, which is probably what they were going for.
The Low-quality characters with high-quality planes and backgrounds are odd. Most of the faces have about 10 lines total while everything in the background has excellent art grade quality.
Overall, as I said before fuck this movie, about NPCs because it's just as boring as you would expect NPC life to be except when they are facing the player. Watch the dogfights on YouTube and forget this movie ever existed just like the NPCs in the movie.
Once you see and watch the videogame of the same name everything will make sense and you may be deeply intrigued or just hoping you'll never see a movie like it ever again.
Now go watch Yukikaze a far more realistic and much more enjoyable OVA series about Advanced Aircraft that won't bore you to tears or put you to sleep.
