The new Midway movie comes across as a predictable game of battle ship.

Rating: 4/10 (8 November 2019)

Midway is a remake of the 1976 film of the same name. The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.
In the film, the US Navy in Pearl Harbor has been attacked by Japan. Japan thought it had sunk the entire fleet, but the remaining aircraft carriers decided to take revenge on Japanese troops with a surprise attack. For this they need to locate the enemy forces without getting noticed. The Navy knows how to locate the Japanese around the Midway Island in the Pacific. Now, with espionage and war tactics, they have to outsmart the larger group of Japanese with their surprise attack. This is how the battle of Midway begins.
This film is about famous events from the Second World War around the attack on Pearl Harbor. This event has previously been filmed in the original film from 1976 and in 2001 in the Pearl Harbor film directed by Michael Bay. Michael Bay unfortunately chose to fill his film with his own fictional version and a triangular relationship. Although he filled this film with a fictional and long-winded story, he managed to put in credible and entertaining action scenes with explosions. Roland Emmerich also tries to do this with this film only without the success that Michael Bay had. In Midway, both navy fleets always try to sink each other with surprise attacks. The problem is that as a viewer you get to see the scenes in which both navy fleets plan their surprise attacks and this only remains a surprise for the film characters. This makes the film a kind of predictable naval battle game for viewers and especially for viewers who are familiar with the history of this battle. After the umpteenth planning and attack scene, the film also feels a little repeatedly what makes the film more predictable and thus a bit more elaborate.
Michael Bay managed to fill his film with exaggerated but credible explosions that he is familiar with. In his older films such as Independence Day, Roland Emmerich managed to make the explosions in the film more credible than he does nowadays in his films. He now chooses to place this in a more technical way in his films with CGI and a green screen.
The cast consists of a group of famous actors such as Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Mandy Moore and Woody Harrelson. The problem is that most of their characters have not really been worked out, making it difficult for them to keep track of who exactly is and what he is doing during the film. Most characters you only recognize by the face of the actor who plays the character.