Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 2.0
How to ruin a movie with by sloppy editing
The overall presentation of the Midway campaign is accurate but this movie was made on the cheap and it shows. The plight of Heston's son and his Japanese American girlfriend shows a real problem that existed but is poorly integrated into the plot.The real problem is the combat footage, almost all of which was stolen from elsewhere and stuck in with no sense of responsibility. First, don't use recognizable footage from one of the best WWII films made, Tora, Tora, Tora, especially using the very recognizable P40, an army plane not used at Midway, taking off against a mountainous background just after you've used a long shot showing that Midway was a flat atoll. Second, pay attention to what you just showed -- do not show a single seat fighter crashing just after you've shown the interior of a three seat plane getting shot up. Don't mix dive bombing (steep angle) and glide bombing (shallow angle)shots and do not!! show an extrior of the plane pulling out of a dive and then flip back to a studio shot showing the cockpit still pitched at a downward angle.Finally, the Yorktown was not hit by a kamikaze so don't use the footage of the USS Franklin getting hit late in the war.You don't have to be the type of military buff who can tell the different versions of a plane by small details to notice this kind of corner cutting. Instead of competing with Tora Tora Tora, the makers of Pearl Harbor should have remade this one.