Midway (2/10)

by Tony Medley

138 minutes.

PG-13

Hollywood made a lot of hokey war movies during WWII. This fits right in. It’s got platitudinous dialogue straight out of the old B movies that Hollywood churned out by the dozens. The first hour plus is so uninvolving and clichéd it’s soporific. Directed by Roland Emmerich (from a script by Wes Tooke who has never written a script for a feature film before) who is responsible for The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and White House Down (2013), two of the dumbest movies I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure, it should not come as a surprise that this film is so poorly done.

And it’s a shame, if not a crime, that the battle of Midway should be treated so shabbily (and it’s the second time, too; Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda struck out on the 1976 effort). It’s one of the greatest battles in the history of the world, turning the war in the Pacific around with a five minute assault on the Japanese aircraft carriers by heroic dive bombers after two torpedo squadron attacks had failed miserably.

The casting is awful. Ed Skrein plays hero Dick Best as an egotistical, gum-chewing jerk. While Woody Harrelson looks like Admiral Chester Nimitz, he gives one of the worst performances of his career. Dennis Quaid is nothing like I imagine Bull Halsey to have been. The one performance that seems authentic is Patrick Wilson as Edwin Layton, an intelligence officer.

There are so many reasons to hate this movie that I don’t have room for them all. One glaring reason is the almost subliminal mention of Torpedo Squadron 8, 16 torpedo delivering planes. They had to fly flat and straight at almost sea level to drop their torpedoes directly into withering fire. All 16 were shot down without scoring a hit, and all the pilots but one died. Emmerich barely mentions them (if you blink you miss it, literally) while he can spend more than an hour showing wives and families and other inconsequential things other than the real battle.

Despite the almost 2 ½ hour runtime, what he also fails to show is how long the battle went on (hours) before the dive bombers finally found the Japanese fleet at the last possible moment. The battle looked lost; but there is no feeling of the despair that was felt by our naval commanders as the battle went on and on without any positive result until, finally, the dive bombers found the fleet and within the space of five minutes, three of the four Japanese carriers were destroyed and victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat. That’s the truly miraculous story of Midway and Emmerich fails to capture it.

The only reason I don’t give this terrible film a zero or negative number is because the attack by the dive bombers on the Japanese aircraft carriers is very well done. It shows the harrowing danger of diving to bomb a ship in the face of immense anti-aircraft bullets that were being thrown at them. It’s amazing that any of them survived but it certainly emphasizes the courage of the pilots who kept on coming.

It wasn’t enough for Emmerich to make an inept movie, he compounds this felony by dedicating it to the Americans, ­and Japanese! who participated in the battle. Worse, it presents the Japanese, not as a vicious enemy, but with a soft, understanding, even admirable moral equilibrium that is false and maddening.

This trying to paint the Japanese who initiated and fought WWII as just guys exactly like our GIs was started by Clint Eastwood and his ill-advised film, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). Let’s get something straight here; there is no moral equivalence between our American fighting men and the Japanese they were fighting. The Japanese were monsters, responsible for immense war crimes like the Rape of Nanking (I’ve seen pictures of the atrocities and they are sickening), the Bataan Death March, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of innocent Korean and Chinese women into forced prostitution (for the truth on that see here and here), all of which were willingly, eagerly participated in by the entire Japanese army, not just a few of their leaders, that Emmerich and Eastwood choose to honor. That’s a disgrace.