Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 3.0
History soured by romantic mush!
This should have been a straight historical film, along the lines of Tora Tora Tora, The Longest Day, Gettysburg , and Of Gods and Generals, to make it the DEFINITIVE film on Midway. Unfortunately, the romantic side story and the use of the English language by the Japanese participants, turn this movie into another war-romance feature. A lot of stock footages from Tora Tora Tora were used (shades of the B westerns!). As to how Universal got access to these from Twentieth-Fox puzzles me. The use of actual battle color footages is distracting as the grainy quality and the different camera angles are obviously out of whack with the cinematographic structure of the presentation. Editing out the romantic side story would make this more palatable historically. That would make the film tighter as, as is, the film is already long winded.