A procedural-style account of the key WWII battle that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific, Midway doesn’t get to the titular battle until about an hour and twenty minutes into the movie, but paints such a detailed portrait of the all the events leading up to it that the climactic scenes of aerial combat at sea are especially captivating.
Directed by Roland Emmerich, Midway is filled with the kind of explosive imagery, cartoonish characterizations, gung-ho jingoism, and stilted dialogue that one expects from the man behind both Independence Day movies along with 1998’s Godzilla.
2019’s Midway isn’t even as somber or realistic as the star-studded 1976 film film of the same name. But as a faithful recreation of the kind of movie John Ford (who shows up as a character here) might have made with John Wayne in years following WWII, it’s hard to fault what Emmerich has put together here.
After the unflinching realism of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the war movie was forever changed: gone were the gung-ho John Wayne archetypes and in their place real people who spill real guts. Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge partially served up the cornball hokum of a 1950s Hollywood war movie, but also didn’t shy away from the splatter-movie bloodshed of the battlefield.
In Midway, meanwhile, the most violent moments during the climactic battle come when dive bomber Dick Best inhales some bad oxygen and coughs up blood, or when his tailgunner burns his hand on the barrel of his machine gun. The thousands of deaths during the Battle of Midway are only inferred here, as fireballs light up Japanese carriers and the sea swallows crashed planes.
Before we get there, however, Midway has a lot of ground to cover. The film begins in 1937 with Patrick Wilson as Edwin Layton, an American officer in Japan who receives a stern warning from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) about US involvement in upcoming global events.
Years later, Layton is, as he puts it, “the intelligence officer behind the worst intelligence failure in American history” after Japanese bombers destroy the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. But it wasn’t for Layton’s lack of trying: he warned his superiors about the forthcoming attack, and incoming Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Woody Harrelson) is a lot more open to his input.
Midway glosses over the Pearl Harbor attack in about ten minutes, as it does the Tokyo Raid by General James Doolittle (Aaron Eckhart) later in the film. But these and other key events in the months leading up to the Battle of Midway are crucial to understanding the perspectives on both sides of the battleground during the upcoming fight. It takes a long time to get there, but the effort that screenwriter Wes Tooke takes in making sure the audience has every last detail makes the intense, explosive climax all the more exciting.
Other scenes detail the lives of the naval pilots and gunners who will take part in that climactic battle, including Dick Best (Ed Skrein), Clarence Dickinson (Luke Kleintank), Eugene Lindsey (Darren Criss), Bruno Gaido (Nick Jonas), and James Murray (Keean Johnson). Their commander, Fleet Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, is played by Dennis Quaid with the kind of rugged everyman determinism that a James Cagney might have brought to the role.
All these real-life figures are given the gutsy characterization of a 1950s war movie stereotype, with the central Best character given the trait of being just too damn courageous: despite a wife (played by Mandy Moore) and young child at Pearl Harbor, he flies into battle so heroically its as if, as other characters repeat numerous times during the film, he doesn’t care if he comes back.
Still, the broad characterizations of the naval fleet don’t take away from the genuinely exciting Battle of Midway climax, in which the bombers finally take to the skies. It’s in these scenes that Midway truly shines, the film having taken the extra effort to carefully detail everything at stake before getting to the expectedly bombastic climax.
It’s in these scenes, many crafted from the point-of-view of Best and other pilots diving into the line of fire to drop bombs on the Japanese carriers, that 2019’s Midway actually tops the 1976 film, which starred four or five Oscar winners in roles here filled by the likes of a Jonas brother (that movie used actual wartime footage in place of staged battle scenes). Accept the hokey presentation and this Midway is everything you could want from a sanitized, 1950s-era war movie, and it might be the best film its director has made.
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