Midway (2019) • Blu-ray
Tags: Movies, Film, Culture, Review, Cinema

Midway (2019) • Blu-ray

The story of the Battle of Midway, told by the leaders and the sailors who fought it.

The late, great film critic Roger Ebert memorably described Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) as “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.” Roland Emmerich’s Midway, which chronicles both the Pearl Harbor attack and the US naval campaign that culminated in the Battle of Midway, six months later, doesn’t quite reach Pearl Harbor ‘s runtime (clocking in at “only” 138-minutes), but it feels almost as interminable.

The problem here is the opposite of that afflicting Bay’s film, however. Where Pearl Harbor dawdled over its romantic entanglements and relegated the war to second place, Midway is fixated on the military proceedings and never lets anything like a well-developed character get in the way. The action skips back and forth from the US fleet to headquarters back in the States, with occasional detours to the Japanese side (portrayed with even-handedness) but little intrusion from the civilian world.

In its favour, Midway (which apart from its historical setting has little in common with the 1976 movie of the same name) does a reasonable job of explaining exactly what was at stake as the Japanese and American navies clashed in the Pacific, and exactly how their battles were conducted. Screenwriter Wes Tooke elaborates in one of the Blu-ray’s featurettes that even quite minor events in the film are based on factual records.

So a viewer who’s more interested in history and military strategy than drama might find it satisfying enough, although the chances are that anyone really fascinated by the period will know everything that Midway has to relate anyway (and there’s at least one glaringly misleading intertitle, which implies that Japan didn’t invade China until after 1937).

The locations are often interesting and the details of combat are vivid and clear, too, helped by a sparklingly bright, clean transfer to Blu-ray. If you want to know how artillery was fired or a plane was piloted, Midway seems to deliver — although there have been quibbles in online forums and from military experts.

But even the battle scenes are terribly cold and (like the entire film) hugely reliant on CGI, lacking any sense of messiness, urgency, or confusion, let alone actual death or fear. The VFX sequences are like animated illustrations of engineering than tense episodes in the lives of believable people. Indeed, the Pearl Harbor attack strongly resembles video game graphics and is about as thrilling as a game you’re not playing.

This care for the superficial detail, at the expense of depth and engagement, extends to the human story too. Tooke’s debut script is largely to blame. Not only is it strewn with banal lines like “nobody would doubt your courage”, or clunky exposition like the below-decks Japanese sailor helpfully saying to himself “this place is a powder keg”. We can live with a little of that. But more problematically, there are too many characters, threads, and pointless little scenes.