Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 1.0
This movie sucked
The pivotal Battle of Midway really deserves a good, no, not good, great movie. Unfortunately, this one ain't it. This is pretty much the only one out there, but if you want to really know what happened at the Battle of Midway, skip this cheesy Hollywood dreck and read Walter Lord or Gordon Prange, or Parshall and Tully--from those descriptions, you will have, in your mind's eye a much clearer picture than the confusing and chaotic hodgepodge that the producers and directors of this awful movie offered up. Really, this movie would be better classed as one of those early '70s big mega-star disaster flicks except that in this one the "good guys" win. The shoddy way they tried to cut corners is an insult to the men who the movie supposedly celebrates.The producers of Tora Tora Tora got dinged because their $20 million depiction of the Pearl Harbor attack--despite being as accurate as they could make it--was a box office flop. They must've decided it was because there was no love story. So, in Midway, they combined that formulaic Hollywood love angle with an Ed Wood-style work ethic: "let's do this on the cheap, get it done yesterday--who cares about accuracy--we can do half this movie using archival footage." The result is both insulting and embarassing. Because there were plenty of outtakes from Tora, they could slip a lot of aerial action in on the cheap. Cheaper and cheesier still, what they didn't have from Tora, they made up, using clumsily spliced, archival stock footage of just about every navy aircraft that ever flew in WWII and a few that didn't, including Korean War-era jets (the producers must've figured "if that plane is painted blue we'll use it--nobody'll know the difference"). Now, Midway was in June, 1942, but the movie mixes and matches outtakes from Tora with stock footage from '44, '45, Kamikazes (which didn't first appear until almost 2 and a half years after Midway) and even postwar. I was in my teens when I first saw this movie with all the sensurround; even back then I cringed at its cheesiness and groaned on seeing Coral Sea-era F4Fs with the big red meatballs in the stars, or even worse, Okinawa-era Corsairs and Hellcats. If I had to describe this movie to someone who's never seen it in one sentence, it would be: "Charleton Heston starts rolling down the deck on his final mission in an F6F, becomes airborne in a TBF, flies toward the enemy carrier in an SB2U, drops his bombs from BOTH an SBD and an SB2C (hmmm, musical dive bombers), and crashes in flaming glory back on his carrier in an F9F Panther!!" That says it all for me about this clunker--a real embarassment for any aviation or history buff--and even if you're not one of those, just skip this one, it's nothing special.I've only seen this one once. Once was enough. I keep hoping Spielberg will do a movie about VT-8. Now THAT would be something...