To say that “Midway,” a new cinematic re-creation of the decisive 1942 air and sea battle from Roland Emmerich, the director of “Independence Day,” soars to the heights of his best work is to say it sputters along at sea level. It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

The film belongs to a particular lineage of World War II picture (“Tora! Tora! Tora!” and the 1976 “Midway”) that — unlike, say, Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” — prioritizes scope over individual drama. To cram all the complexities of geography and who was where when into less than two and a half hours, “Midway” resorts to having its characters converse in exposition, sacrificing one form of verisimilitude for another.

“We get 80 percent of our oil from your country,” the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) informs Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson), an American naval intelligence officer, when they meet in a prologue set in 1937. The audience needs that clunkily relayed context for Pearl Harbor, the first combat spectacle that Emmerich stages.