On a par with Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor

Rating: 3/10 (12 November 2019)

I'm genuinely shocked at all the 10/10 reviews here - we must have seen different films, as I found Midway a bit of a mixed bag to say the least! It's in a very similar league to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. Amazing action sequences of planes attacking ships (reminiscent of Star Wars space battles - a credit to George Lucas for setting the standard), but the rest of it is pretty duff - I guess I shouldn't have expected too much more from action director Roland Emmerich.
A lot of the time, it felt like I was watching a Commando-style comic book ("Take that, boche!"). All the characters were muscular and had prominent chiselled chins. The script was pretty awful. One of the main characters was called Dick Best (at the end it was revealed he was real), a gum-chewing maverick pilot, and so there were lines like, "It's because of men like Dick Best that we'll win this war!", or "Goddammit Dick Best!!" As well as a comic book feel, it came across as a propaganda war film. It was unbelievably full of cliche; I think the worst might have been when Dick Best flew his dive bomber the length of the Japanese carrier just above the deck to drop his bomb right through the very centre of the red sun painted on the deck, while snarling "This one's for Pearl Harbor!" One of the consequences of this cliche was that it made it hard to care about any of the characters. There was only one line I enjoyed: Woody Harrelson saying something about a man in fuzzy slippers leading a bunch of tuba players to crack the Japanese codes.
It followed a potted history of the war in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor, through the Doolittle raid (including a sequence where Doolittle is in China), Coral Sea, and then to a longer sequence about the Battle of Midway, all in 2hrs 20 mins, so quite a pace of events. I don't understand why a film called "Midway" needed to cram all this in.
Lots of things irked me. For instance, during the Pearl Harbor attack, I couldn't understand why the Japanese fighters kept strafing perfectly between the US battleships, instead of strafing the actual ships. Or, after Doolittle bails out in China, he hooked up with some Chinese guerrillas, and as they leave a village it is subjected to a raid by Japanese bombers. "But there's no installations here!!" cries out Doolittle in melodramatic anguish, and one of the Chinese peasants replies to him in English something like "They're not bombing installations, they're bombing the people!" Yet 10 mins earlier we watched Doolittle flying over densely populated Tokyo merrily dropping bombs everywhere.
The portrayal of the Japanese was pretty poor. It was interesting that an attempt was made to show the Japanese side, but it was half-hearted and entirely served the purposes of exposition. Whenever we switched to a Japanese scene, the soundtrack helpfully signalled it with Japanese traditional music (no reciprocal traditional American music for the American scenes). There are no named Japanese characters apart from the Japanese admirals making their fateful decisions, though there are some hapless sailors saying things like "This place is a tinderbox" as they reload planes.
Worth seeing for the drama of aircraft diving through flak to bomb ships (and bringing to mind what must have been the incredible bravery of the aircrew), but the rest of the drama is pretty terrible. On reflection, it's actually almost indistinguishable from Pearl Harbor.