Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour was a masterpiece after all

Rating: 4/10 (6 November 2019)

It's a hollow, vacuous and impersonal dramatisation of an integral Pacific battle that ultimately makes Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour a comparative masterpiece! Seriously, what did you expect from the man who directed 2012 and Universal Soldier?
At least Pearl Harbour had panache. Midway is a soulless experience that lacks even the faintest flicker of a visual flair. Viewers are taken through the events of December 1941 as a means to explain how it led up to the Battle of Midway between America and Japan in June 1942.
On paper at least, Roland Emmerich, as the master of disaster, was probably the best man to handle and choreograph the carnage of Midway. However, he relies on a jarring overuse of shoddy Chinese CGI that desperately lacks the practical authenticity of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. I realise however, that due to the sheer scale of destruction that occurred at Midway, a minimal use of CGI would have proved virtually impossible. But it didn't have to look so cheap and distracting.
The effects however, were not nearly as distracting as Nick Jonas or likewise, Woody Harrelson's wig. Characters are threadbare and underdeveloped. Ed Skrein (Deadpool) is oddly miscast as Lt. Dick Best (Dick Best, I mean really?), a steely do-or-die squadron leader with a dubious and unconvincing New Jersey accent.
Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid and Mandy Moore are all fine in their thankless roles but it's the majority of the other characters, including Dick Best (stop sniggering!), that are annoying and cliched caricatures that are high on the fumes of American patriotism and gung-ho jingoism. Not only that but the dialogue is conventional and expositional at best and toe curling at its worst.
It's not all terrible though! Firstly, the runtime is mercilessly shorter than Pearl Harbour whilst some of the action is, on occasions, quite exciting. It's also, for the most part, historically accurate but it was the sensitive portrayal of the Japanese that surprised me most. Unlike their American onscreen adversaries, they are not caricatures of themselves.
But none of that is not nearly enough to outweigh the criticisms, which is a shame because Midway is an important story of WW2 that deserves to be told, just like Dunkirk, D-Day, Stalingrad and the Battle of the Bulge. Emmerich was not the right man to tell this story.
3.5/10