Midway by Roland Emmerich. Image courtesy of Lionsgate.
Midway, the latest film from big budget disaster porn specialist Roland Emmerich, is first cousin to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor. Midway covers a lot of the same ground - the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid - but takes it one act further up to the Battle of Midway, which is considered the point when the outgunned US Navy turned the tide in the Pacific. It also ditches the sappy love triangle, but keeps the same agonizingly terrible dialogue and macho military jingoism. Midway ends up being a slightly better film - as long as you are willing to turn your brain off.
The aerial battle sequences are great. And, particularly for an American, it’s framed as a compelling underdog story of American naval can-do spirit. It’s got so much ground to cover that it never flags, and indeed often seems like large sections were probably left on the cutting room floor. But the basic draw of Midway is watching as CGI carriers and battleships and dive bombs wheel around in the sea and the air and try to destroy one another. The scale is impressively conveyed. The dog fights and the bombing runs are intense and well executed.
However, that is about all you should expect from a movie like this. It’s very old school in that the plot, the characters and the dialogue are merely empty vessels through which to tell an uplifting story of American military tenacity in the face of great adversity. The characters are cardboard cut-outs, though they are based on real people. Ed Skrein as Dick Best is particularly manic, trying very hard to be the hot-shot flyboy with an accent that is all over the globe. The plot is very workmanlike, as you would expect. Think Tora! Tora! Tora or the Guns of Navaronne or any old school American military flick - it’s only purpose is to depict our military as heroes.
The dialogue in this film was obviously an after-thought, no doubt added after the CGI had finished rendering. Patrick Wilson as Lt. Commander Layton, an intelligence officer, is perhaps the most obvious, almost hilarious, example of an clumsy exposition machine masquerading as a character. Any time he walks into a room the other character in the scene says something like “Ah, Layton you are the guy who predicted Pearl Harbor but nobody believed you.” Or, he walks into a room and says “I am just a military attache.” It’s actually almost comical how bad and clumsy the dialogue is. I could go on, but suffice it to say that Midway is fundamentally just a big dumb movie.
But that doesn’t preclude it from also being fun. And fun it is, as long as you can just sort of lean back, turn your brain off, ignore the terrible dialogue, and let the spectacle of this big dumb movie wash over you. Which is essentially how all Roland Emmerich films are to be enjoyed, so there’s nothing new here under the sun.
