Tries to cover too much ground while still leaving out key details

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2020)

This wasn't a bad movie, I enjoyed it but it wasn't in the same league with the great war films and actually the 1976 movie Midway with Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda is a better film.
Historically this film is pretty close to the mark which I did appreciate but it just tried to cover too much ground and jumped around too much. The Battle of Midway alone is a subject worthy of it's own movie, there was no need to touch, briefly and sometimes confusingly, on the Marshal Islands, the Coral Sea, and even Pearl Harbor. It made the move confusing, scattered and rushed. We watched this at home and I was constantly hitting pause to explain to my wife what was going on, and my wife is a very sharp person.
Midway could have easily filled the two plus hour run time of this film on it's own. If they had done that they could have covered so many more interesting parts of the battle that were either touched on very briefly or left out all together. Some of these that come to mind;
They never even show the Yorktown being attacked and only refer to it very briefly toward the end of the film.
One of the most memorable aspects of the battle that has reached legendary status over the years is the doomed attack of Torpedo 8 squadron. They do touch briefly on this and show the one survivor, Ensign Gay, in the water but it deserved a lot more screen time. They didn't even show Gay being rescued and just left his fate up in the air. He later became an airline pilot and wrote a book about his experiences in the battle.
There are no Wildcat fighters in the film at all, to someone who knows little about the subject it would appear that our carriers had no fighter aircraft at all because they are totally absent. Wildcats played a huge role in the battle.
A great many aircrews got lost or simply ran out of fuel after their attacks and many of those were never heard from again. This has always been a haunting part of the battle for me, it's not even mentioned here.
The incident in which a Dauntless crew are interrogated and then murdered by the Japanese is shown and is true to the facts so I appreciated that. I found it interesting that, after depicting this scene, and considering all the other atrocities committed by the Japanese in WWII Roland Emmerich found it necessary to honor the Japanese forces at the end of the film.
I also wondered throughout the movie what was up with the wrinkled uniforms...I doubt any naval officer at the time would have appeared in such a state, war or no war.
With all of that it was still an enjoyable movie but in the end something of a disappointment because it could have been so much better. Less would have been more here and sticking to the Battle of Midway would have been the thing to do. If you're interested in the battle I do recommend the 1970's movie, it's a more focused re-telling of the battle and doesn't include some of the cheesy dialogue this movie has.