Thankfully, not the sequel to Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor"

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2019)

Out of all the battles of World War II that have been portrayed on the big - and small - screen, the Battle of Midway has been the among the most difficult to adapt. The battle itself consisted of a complex series of events spread out over hundreds of miles of ocean and spanning a period of several days. There are the technical challenges of depicting naval and aerial combat. And there was also a considerable amount of prologue leading up to the Battle of Midway involving episodes occurring around the Asia-Pacific theater.
Any attempt to depict the Battle of Midway in a film setting is therefore going to face all of these challenges, and more. But all in all, Director Roland Emmerich does a fair job in balancing the history with dramatic interpretation.

The strongest parts of this film were the battle sequences, particularly those involving the actual battle of Midway. It's interesting that Emmerich chose to focus more specifically on the USS Enterprise and particularly on the dive bombers of "Bombing 6," and I think that this approach actually worked well. Unlike the 1976 version, some of the actual pilots of Bombing 6 (particularly Richard "Dick" Best and Wade McClusky) are portrayed extensively - and for the most part sensitively - in this version.
The Japanese perspective is also largely portrayed respectfully in this film. One particularly moving scene involved the scuttling of the Hiryu and Rear Admiral Yamaguchi's decision to go down with his flagship.
All of this being said, this version of the Midway Battle suffers from a number of issues. In particular, the movie drags at the beginning and then feels rushed at the end. I'm not sure if this movie really needed to depict Pearl Harbor, the Marshall Islands raid, and the Doolittle Raid in the detail that it did. And some of the actual Battle scenes felt rushed, with important details omitted (e.g. the contributions of the PBY Catalina search planes, which get a lot more mention in the 1976 version than this one).
Generally speaking, the acting in this movie was good, although you can tell the actors who were really settling into their characters from the ones "phoning it in."
In terms of historical accuracy, I did not detect any glaring errors or omissions. I could tell that certain episodes received special mention (perhaps due to the producers involved in this film). The Marshall Islands are not "high" islands like Tahiti or Hawai'i but low lying coral atolls like Midway. And as mentioned previously, certain scenes from the actual Battle of Midway were omitted or felt rushed.

But overall, I enjoyed this film version of the Battle of Midway. To some degree, this version is more historically accurate than the 1976 version. There was quite a bit of CGI, but that's to be expected from a war film covering such an epic battle (and CGI is better than recycled war movie footage). And thankfully, this is not the "sequel" to Pearl Harbor that I was afraid this movie would be. If anything, this is the way they should've made Pearl Harbor, with all the romantic triangle story baloney minimized or thrown out.

A Solid 8/10 (especially for the actual battle scenes)