Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 2.0
Too Bad This 3rd-Rater Has No Competitors
An irrelevant, dopey, unbelievable subplot involving dad/son/Japanese girlfriend and other personal stuff, along with overacting by Heston and an inexplicably silly performance by Hal Holbrook, is very nearly cause for avoiding this half-baked war movie. I received this edition from Amazon as a gift from a relative. One previous reviewer noted that if the original movie's 30-minute intro section on the Tokyo Raid and Coral Sea had been retained for the DVD, this would have been a "much better" release. No way. Besides material stolen from Thiry Seconds Over Tokyo, Tora Tora Tora, and even John Ford's 1942 Pearl Harbor documentary (!), you have a shot of a swastika-clad German Bf109 being shot down by the Japanese (Messerschmitts at Midway? Mmm, no, I don't buy it); on a carrier deck, a pilot climbs into a 1942 SBD Dauntless and takes off in a 1945 Hellcat; in a sequence of quick shots of AA batteries aboard a Japanese carrier shooting at American planes, you briefly see a shot from an American carrier firing at kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945; a shot of a Jap carrier is labeled "The Kaga", but is another unnamed Japanese carrier, looks like the Soryu; there are plenty of shots of larger American Essex class carriers beyond CV-9, none of which had been built in June 1942; and there's lots of color carrier action news footage that's easily recognizable as film shot during the Marianas campaign in 1944. It's a shame, because by 1976 there existed more than enough authentic footage from early WWII to make three versions of this film. This movie does, probably by accident, have several seconds of slightly colorized b&w footage that was actually shot during the real battle of Midway. In case no one noticed, almost every American naval officer in this movie, and some of the Army personnel, are out of uniform. The 2 stars of charity I give here are for the last half of the film, which sticks at least fairly accurately to real events, though it short-changes some important ones and ends before the real battle did. The producers might at least have used WWII footage of PBY Catalina patrol planes, but the PBY's shown here have post-Korea paint jobs. Near the end, the film does accurately depict some of the serious horror and blood of carrier warfare. But overall, "Midway" doesn't come close to giving us the full import of this battle, which historians class as one of the most influential battles in naval history - - a list that includes Marc Antony's defeat at Actium, the sinking of the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Trafalgar, and even the Battle of the Coral Sea (which preceded Midway by less than a month, but which is cut from this DVD release). On the other hand, Amazon's price is almost reasonable if you count the battle sequence and added features. But don't expect too much from the battle scenes -- expect even less from the movie's first hour. Low budget or no low budget, this is not a fitting tribute to the meager but brave force that stood up to a huge enemy navy in the early, desperate days of the Pacific war.