Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 3.0
Midway between just another parade of stars, and a classic
MIDWAY had pretentions of being another star studded epic drama, heavy on the patriotic drum banging to the exclusion of historical fact, while squeezing in countless cameo appearances by aging Hollywood actors. Thankfully MIDWAY avoided these extremes by remaining fairly close to the facts and limiting the drama to the fictional relationship between Captain Matthew Garth (Charlton Heston) and his junior officer son over the latter's love for a Japanese girl. It does tilt towards being another Hollywood WWII epic with a parade of stars such as Henry Fonda (Adm. Nimitz), Toshiro Mifune (Adm. Yamamoto), Robert Mitchum (Adm Halsey); all of whom put in good acting performances, although Mifune would have been better served with subtitles rather than a dubbed voice. Hal Holbrook was convincing as the intelligence officer who intercepted and decoded the Japanese message that told the US that a strike on Midway was planned.We all know the significance of this momentous battle which saw Japan lose the mainstays of their carrier force in less than a day, and completely turn the tide of the Pacific war in favor of the US, just 6 months after Pearl Harbor; the movie appropriately spends sufficient time in developing on the important background details with one exception. When we reach the most critical point in the battle - with the US planes catching the Japanese flat tops as sitting ducks, covered with refueling and rearming planes - the movie is silent with explanations of how this happened. Fate, karma, or misfortunes of war may be all there was to it, but it would have helped put this Japanese disaster into its proper context if a little more time had been spent on developing it.It's a minor point to be sure; a more legitimate grouse is the heavy use of stock battle scenes, especially the cut and paste approach used here. The scenes do not flow and the contrast between the stock footage and MIDWAY production is jarring. It doesn't help either that most of the footage used will be very familiar if you've seen earlier movies set in the Pacific theatre - TORA, TORA, TORA, in particular.This movie is good enough and I will resist the temptation for comparisons except to say that this one is only MIDWAY there, TORA, TORA, TORA, is the classic.