MIDWAY 2019 GOES ALL THE WAY WITH REALISM, TRUE-TO-LIFE PACIFIC WARTIME DRAMA

Rating: 10/10 (24 April 2020)

In 1945, I, a 7 year old boy, was astonished seeing a huge photo of the atomic bomb mushroom cloud over Hiroshima printed on the front page of the Chicago Herald. Kids my age were on the streets flying nice models of Navy Wildcat fighters and Japanese Zeros made of paper with coins in their noses. Ever since that time I've wanted to learn what World War II was really like, Pacific and European. Only in the past few years have I discovered how incrediby crucial and miraculous the outcome of the Battle of Midway was. Twenty years in the Navy taught me a lot about ships, planes, guns and bombs, but it never came home to me so completely as it did over the past hour when I rented this film for viewing on our 46 inch TV and watched it, transfixed for over two hours. I've read nearly every article, seen the last (1976) and most unsatisfactory Midway movie, watched every TV documentary, and listened to all the War College expert lectures I could find. Spare me the specious criticisms of other writers about poor scriptwriting. I've seen all the wartime films of blood, gore, mayhem and sudden death. This film's opening scenes of the start of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor were as horrifying and believeable, given over as it was to not only the famous bombings of the moored battleships, but also showed the Japanese fighters machinegunning civilians in the streets, the plane-to-plane bloody, deadly encounters between Japanese fighters and arriving American aircraft, their pilots astonished at the unbelieveable scene in the skies over the sunny Hawaiian waters. Search if you will for paintings by knowledgable and skilled artists of the air-to-surface actions of June 4th thru 6th of 1944, and you have no more than the blink of an eye's view of how it really happened. It is more to be wondered at when one considers that only 2 motion picture photographers took any film footage of the actual aerial attacks and dogfights, and John Ford's footage shot on East Midway Island, although processed into a short film, covered very little of importance. The special effects of all attack scenes were outstandingly rendered by the battalions of historian-artists who made it totally unnecessary to try to fool this film's audience by substituting existing postwar ships for Depression-era-built vessels of the 1941 Navy. Neither did the producers try to make do with tank models of miniaturized Japanese war vessels, or poorly disguise full sized outdated American warcraft. Considerable research of the structures that were shown in the process of being bombed must have been made over a very long period. Much of the violent battle scenery seems to have been designed for viewing in three dimensions, and it seems dozens of large fragments of planes and ships are blown directly at the movie viewer! Casting was excellent, for the famous characters Admiral Chester W Nimitz, and William F. Halsey. My admiration of Woody Harrelson's portrayal of Admiral Nimitz is especially high. He has come far from the shy, self-conscious barkeep at Cheers. A few things were missed which were important, I feel. Nobody showed the incident when the Thatch Weave tactic was used for the first time in combat very successfully to defeat Zeros attempting to shoot down slower, less maneuverable American fighter pilot, and being blown out of the sky by superior American pilots in inferior aircraft. Also, - - not an important point - - I'm not sure the Japanese began attacking around 7:30 in the morning, while crewmen were setting up chairs for Sunday church services. I've always read, and been told, that they began just as buglers began sounding morning colors and National ensigns were rising on the flagstaffs of ships in the harbor. To summarize: I expect that MIDWAY 2019 will win many, many awards for outstanding special effects in years to come, and that this film will be a must-see at the US military academies, and a hot item for World War II veterans, their families and their decendants.