Better Than The First Midway

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2020)

As an amateur military historian, Midway surprised me. Judging by the reviews here I expected it to be another Pearl Harbour.
It is much better. In fact it is almost four movies in one. It covers (albeit briefly) Pearl Harbour, the Doolittle Raid (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo), The Battle of the Coral Sea, and Midway.
The CGI is amazing, and the flight characteristics of the aircraft is done very well. Adding to the sense of reality is the loud and extremely realistic sound track.
The movie doesn't get bogged down in a love interest, and the two hours passed quite quickly.
The only negatives were that some of the CGI effects were overdone. Like when during the Pearl Harbour attack almost every strafing Japanese fighter's bullets caused massive explosions. This did make it look a bit like a computer game at times.
The other problem was the lack of historical detail. Rather than show the Doolittle raid, It would have been better to have shown what had happened at Coral Sea instead, and why Yorktown was damaged and in for repair. The same went for the battle of Midway. My partner, who didn't know the story, was lost. Not only with what she called technical terms - SBD, TBD, TF etc., but also with what was going on. She didn't know whether she was looking at American or a Japanese planes.
There was no explanation on how at Midway the American squadrons got separated and how they were desperately searching for the a Japanese fleet, which meant they attacked piecemeal. There was no explanation of how the Japanese had put out many search aircraft, but the one which had the search area the American fleet was in, was delayed. No mention was made of the a Japanese subs which got to their blocking positions too late.
What Midway did do well was depict the horror of diving vertically onto an aircraft carrier trying to shoot you out of the sky, with enemy planes on your tail. It also appeared to present a lot of historical fact, rather than interpreted fiction. It even shows that the truth can be better than fiction, like when a sailor on the carrier jumps into the back of a parked aircraft, grabs the machine gun and duels with a Japanese aircraft heading for the carrier deck. It was amazing to see how heroic this was - after reading about it many times.
This is a Great War movie, especially for amateur military historians. Otherwise you might want to read up on the battle before seeing the movie.