Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 1.0
One Star is Too Many For This All-Star Dud
The battle of Midway, considered by most historians to be the turning point of the Pacific War, is one of those subjects that scream "Great movie material!" Almost six months after Pearl Harbor, a small U.S. fleet of 3 aircraft carriers, a handful of cruisers and destroyers, a few submarines, and a motley crew of land based aircraft, faced off against most of the Japanese Combined Fleet. Outnumbered in almost every category, the U.S. Pacific Fleet triumphed at Midway, ending Japan's expansion and forcing her to go into the defensive.Jack Smight's film, released in 1976 with the gimmicky Sensurround sound system, should have been a good movie, since the story of Midway has so many Hollywood-ready elements: Japan's shocked reaction to the Doolitle Raid, the breaking of the JN-25 code by U.S. Navy crypto-analysts, the Japanese buildup and planning, the desperate attempts to repair the damaged USS Yorktown in time for the battle, and the dramatic showdown that led to the sinking of all four of Japan's big carriers on June 4th, 1942. And while Smight's movie does include all of these elements, Midway (the movie) is still a mediocre film.Blame this failure on the screenplay and how the film was shot. The screenplay is mostly to blame: it tries to be both documentary (a la The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far)and melodrama (with fictional characters played by Charlton Heston and Edward Albert as a father-and-son duo of Navy officers, each with melodramatic subplots added, I assume, to give them "human interest.") Worse, the screenplay only depicts the sinking of the four Japanese carriers; while it does show the attacks that damage the USS Yorktown, it never shows the submarine attack that sinks her and her escort, USS Hammann.Another bad move: unlike The Longest Day and The Battle of Britain, which had its Germans speaking German with English subtitles, Midway has its Japanese characters speaking in English! Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa's favorite actor, plays Admiral Yamamoto stiffly, and his lines are dubbed in English...it's almost laughable...reminds me of watching Godzilla on TV. Even worse, when the Japanese plan is depicted on big naval-style charts, the labels on the pieces are in both English and Japanese.In order to cut costs, the producers also cribbed scenes from other, better war movies. The film starts with footage "borrowed" from 1944's Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Richard Fleischer's Tora! Tora! Tora! was the main source for scenes depicting the Japanese attack on Midway Island. In addition, the filmmakers make extensive use of actual color combat footage. Had this footage been shot at Midway, it would not be a problem. But unfortunately most of the war footage comes from later in the war, and planes not in service in 1942 appear hither and yon throughout the movie.Midway veterans, on both sides, deserve a better movie.