by I wish everyone a reflective Armistice Day or Veterans Day this November 11th. War films are one of the biggest ways we in the US look back at our past. Some great films almost supercede the actual collective memories of the war. Midway unfortunately is not one of these great films. Also, just to be clear I am NOT talking about the 1976 Henry Fonda movie.
Spoiler Alert
I’m not talking about dive brakes on a Dauntless either. Midway is a film based on real events as it so bluntly pointed out in the opening credits. The summation of the events is thus: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, December 7th 1941. The US can’t really get beast mode going in the Pacific as fast or as effectively as it would like. The Japanese land a few jabs and prepare a knockout blow at a tiny atoll about 1400 miles from Hawaii. The US gets wind of this and does everything it can to outdo the Japanese Navy and its 4 on 3 carrier powerplay advantage. If you have never heard of this battle, check the wiki for a far more detailed description. If you already heard enough, and don’t want me to totally ruin the movie, go read about some nice Italian food instead.
Why did they remake Pearl Harbor?
Did you ever write a school paper and get lit up for having too much intro? Yeah Midway would get a big fat “See Me” scrawled on the cover page. The first half to two thirds of the movie is all lead up to the main event. First is a huge chunk of screen time dedicated to the attack on Pearl Harbor. While it includes a very cinematic depiction of the destruction of the USS Arizona it goes on too long. Then it’s an island hopping campaign of context segment after context segment. Random carrier sorties, awkward Japanese military weekly meetings, crypto linguist nerds, more explosions, lots of cigarette smoking and then FINALLY it’s Midway time. I get it, you want the audience to understand what they are seeing, and have some character development. But a newsreel mashup or even a damn Star Wars crawl would’ve done the job better.
Don’t start telling a story and then stop…….Midway!
Badum tish. That was the other thing that made this movie as flawed as American torpedoes. Midway was a big complicated battle. There were a lot of moving parts and all sorts of factors leading up to it. Within all those were some great stories. Midway tries to tell too many of them, which ends up underselling them all. At the beginning it shapes up to be a Top Gun with propellers between the stodgy old torpedo bombers and the badass but disregarded dive bombers. Then wait no, it’s a leadership and intel drama. Hold up, we gotta throw Jimmy Doolittle and some atrocity reflection in there. Now it’s a buddy movie about sticking toge……….arrrrgh! It just wavers all over the place. Things streamline a little once the bombs start hitting the flight decks, but by that point the number of storylines was approaching the number of on screen explosions.
Intelligence Failure
Pleasing history nerds is tough. I fully realize the irony of that statement as I am pretty brutally slamming Midway with my keyboard right now, but it’s true. At times, Midway showed a lot of savvy by depicting some obscure facts that would raise the periscopes even the nerdiest of history buffs. However these “oh wows” came at the expense of major crucial events in the battle. Why include five minutes of John Ford filming the island but then the USS Yorktown gets about 90 seconds of screentime? I mean we lost a whole aircraft carrier. Midway doesn’t even show any of Ford’s footage or any vintage footage now that I think about it, so why include him?
Ran out of fuel and had to ditch.
When it was all said and done, Midway was like the Japanese coded transmissions getting deciphered at Pearl. We got 60% of the all the messages and could only understand 40% of what was in them. I feel like the directors wanted a larger more epic film, but the editors didn’t want Lord of the Rings with aircraft carriers so half of it ended up getting cut. That or they really did want an individual zoomed in perspective, but kept tossing on so much contextual and gee whiz obscure bullshit that it capsized like a torpedoed battleship. There were some good things. Midway gave a good sense of how dangerous and crazy naval aviation was back in the day. The CGI folks definitely put in some overtime making some very dynamic visuals of the ships and planes. Also a relatively obscure cast looked the part and gave decent performances. Yeah a few were standard issue war film stereotypes, but none were particularly unlikeable.
Final Report
If you can get past all of Midway’s flaws, it is an ok popcorn muncher. It certainly is not a boring movie and the constant jumping around keeps it from dragging out. Ships explode beautifully, there are some heroic deaths, and the good guys win. Admittedly sometimes it is nice to watch a war flick that doesn’t have some deep message. If you can’t silence your inner history nerd, stay at home and watch the John Ford newsreel on Netflix. That or just invite over people like me to break down the play by play while watching Charlton Heston dodge stock footage in the 1976 release.
