So checked out the new WW2 war movie Midway, a movie about the war in the Pacific. I’d say it was about the Battle of Midway but that’s not exactly true… and that’s one of the bigger problems with the movie.
So Midway is a movie that wants to cover Pearl Harbor, The Marshall Islands, the Doolittle Raid, and the South China Sea, and finally Midway itself. All that bundled into a 2hr 15min movie and what you end up with is a movie that kind of island hops from one scene to the next, skipping along, barely going into enough detail before moving on. There’s numerous isolated, independent, and then forgotten moments throughout the movie… On the way one hand, credit to them for trying to show the scale and scope of the war in the Pacific… but it makes for a jarring, distracted experience that renders major events only in passing.
Doesn’t help the cast is wildly uneven and given the bare bones of things to do. Since the movie is trying so hard to cover so many bases, a large number of characters are only there to bark orders, make Bold Statements, do heroic but contracted actions, or cater to the emotional side of the airmen (one character gets that job). Some of the actors are miscast or struggle too much with their accent. God love him, but Woody Harrelson does not exactly make a convincing military man (he plays Admiral Nimitz). He never stops being Woody Harrelson. Ed Skrien – a British man – makes a few separate attempts at different American accents, thankfully dropping the more stereotypical ones early on. Dennis Quaid as Admiral Halsey could have been a good pick but he turns on his gruff voice a little too harshly (could be accurate to the real person, I can’t say… but it was distracting). Luke Evans and Patrick Wilson do commendable jobs though. Mandy Moore is in it too… as the worried-but-brash wife.
Now for the real big concerns with the flick. The trailers made the combat/battle scenes out to be a CGI nightmare of a video game cut scene. And, to be fair, sometimes it actually plays like that but not as much as I’d feared. I think they genuinely tried to make the air combat and dive bombing scenes feel realistic. Sometimes that means an impossible dive through impossible flack or that a plane crashes into a ship in a spectacular way that was exaggerated. On the other hand, there’s a lot of scenes of torpedoes not going off or bombs missing their targets that probably wouldn’t have been in a more rah-rah action-only Hollywood picture. And I’m sure hard core history buffs will see all the many ways it’s Hollywood-ized… but to my novice but critical eyes, I think they were trying.
Also should note here that the movie is almost exclusively focused on aircraft carriers and airplanes and the sailors and pilots. They do spend a decent amount of time with Patrick Wilson’s intelligence officer and his code-breakers who were critical to the victory and are shown as such. But it’s only passing interested in the actual battle around the island of Midway and, hey, that’s probably fair as it’s all about sinking the Japanese carriers. But they do dabble in passing (as noted before) with scenes on the island, including bringing in Hollywood director John Ford for scenes that were historically accurate… but only for a few random scenes before being forgotten completely.
So yeah, this movie was better than I thought it was going to be and I honestly think they were trying to make a good, honorable movie that wasn’t too too Hollywood. They didn’t do a great job with the cast and the script was all over the place. Either this should have been a mini-series or they should have trimmed the run time and stayed focused on, you know, the Battle of Midway. Seeing more of the history was interesting but ultimately distracting, given how they edited it together.
Score: 74