Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Written by: Wes Tooke
Cast: Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Mandy Moore
Swift shot: A powerful reminder of the price of freedom and what it takes to deliver us from evil. While this film was nearly flawless in its execution, I am left wondering why they felt the need to glorify the Japs. But a clue to that is that Emmerich’s grandfather was in the Wehrmacht.
So, while this wasn’t an apologist’s take on the Pacific Theater, it did sit wrong with me that they lionized the enemy, given the fact we had survivors of Midway in our audience. I wonder what they thought?
The effects in this movie were reminiscent of the LucasArts console game, Secret Weapons Over Normandy. There is a Midway mission that feels so real, you’ll be looking for a life raft in case you need to bail out. And that’s playing a game where you get countless lives.
For the men of the USS Enterprise, they only have one life, and to a man, they will gladly give it to their country to remind the enemy not to fuck with the USA!
[Swift aside: For the Gen Xers out there, I was reminded of Wings of Fury, a game I spent hours playing on my Laser 128, back in the day]
The films starts in 1937, when we were friendly with Japan, and Edwin Layton (Wilson) is a naval attache in Tokyo where he encounters Admiral Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa). The two exchange ideas on the coming threats, and Layton reminds Yamamoto that he once said Japan couldn’t win a war with the United States. And Yamamoto prophetically corrects Layton clarifying, “I said we couldn’t beat you in a long war.”
It’s that statement that cements the Japanese intentions towards America. They want to cripple us in the Pacific so that we can’t meddle in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” because calling it the rape of all of Asia just didn’t have the same ring. And that’s why they attacked us without direct provocation or warning at Pearl Harbor.
But, as the film accurately shows, Yamamoto was reluctant to attack America in 1941, fearing that the Japanese Empire only woke a sleeping giant. Honestly, they had no fucking idea about the mettle, courage, and resolve of the American fighting man – but in Midway, they learned.
We meet the men at Pearl Harbor, as they endure the most brutal attack conceived on American forces, to this day. And unlike the Pearl Harbor film of 2001, Tooke’s Midway doesn’t try to interject love-triangle bullshit to appeal to a wider audience.
This is a straight-up war movie.
At one point, my guest asked to switch seats with me, because the woman sitting next to him was gyrating and emoting so much he was afraid she would burst into tears and start clawing at him . . . or God knows what else.
This movie puts you in the pilot’s seat, and the gunner’s seat in a few scenes that will have you reaching for the imaginary stick and trying to pull out of several diving runs.
But, back to the men of the USS Enterprise, Dick Best (Skrein) is the best pilot in the Navy, just ask him! He’s an arrogant, cocky cowboy from New Jersey who pushes the limits of what his aircraft can do much to chagrin of his Squadron Leader, McClusky (Evans) and his poor passenger, the gunner and navigator, Murray (Johnson).
Once hostilities begin at Pearl, Best is personally impacted in a way that just fuels his fire to stick it to the enemy. Many men were lost that day, and they still bleed with the USS Arizona.
Emmerich envelopes the screen with a ferocious finality. Much like with Tora, Tora, Tora in 1970, there’s a feeling of stunned awe as the Japanese bombers swoop in unscathed and devastate the Americans. This is a scene we are all too familiar with now, but it is the catalyst for Midway and the Doolittle raids also highlighted in the film.
The film does incorporate the wives of the pilots, briefly, by showing the tenacious nature of the women behind the men flying the steel coffins into battle. Anne Best (Moore) and Miriam Layton (Rachael Perrell Fosket) capture that perfectly, as they both support their husbands in different ways.
What happens next is the so-called untold story of Midway, where we are finally given a look at the code-breakers who helped win the battle, and the war for America. Played by Brennan Brown, Joseph Rochefort is exactly what you would expect for a code-breaker, he’s weird, cold and a damned genius.
He’s tasked the now meaningless Navy band members with working on codes, surmising that they are familiar with patterns and rhythms enough to be useful to the cause, instead of just polishing their horns.
So, that and the Japanese side of the battle is what makes this new Midway the untold story.
Emmerich has been consumed with the events of World War II for his whole life, and working on Midway is his passion project. He clearly put his all into this movie too.
This is the best World War II naval air battle movie ever made.
But, it wasn’t without flaws. And I am about to get into spoiler territory here for some of my gripes with the film. If you aren’t intimately familiar with the events of Midway, you’ve been warned.
In the movie, it is purported that the Japanese slaughtered 250,000 Chinese civilians in response to the Doolittle raids. Here’s the thing, our bombing of Japan had no direct correlation to the levels of suffering of the Chinese. None!
And at the end of the movie, Emmerich dedicated Midway to the sailors on both sides. I guess enough time has passed that we can make amends with our former enemies, but to dedicate the movie to the Japanese, who murdered millions of people in the name of “Co-Prosperity” is disgusting.
If you are a World War II buff and just want an amazingly told story about one of the most decisive naval battles in the history of our world, you have to see Midway.
