I hope you said Roland Emmerich, because that’s what you’re getting.
Hey, where’s everybody going??
At least the FX should be better (I hope) than the 70’s version, which blew its budget on a star-studded cast, leaving 37 cents to round up a bunch of syphilitic monkeys and lock them in a room with some WWII stock footage (My personal favorite was Chuck Heston’s dive bomber, which turns into a torpedo plane mid-flight, then becomes a 1950’s jet fighter upon crashing into the carrier).
Not much of a banner cast this time. Just Woody Harrelson playing Adm. Nimitz, backed up by Aaron Eckhart, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, Mandy Moore, and uh… one of the Jonas brothers. Some dude I never heard of will be playing Yamamoto, though I’m not sure how you could possibly top Toshiro Mifune, voiced by Burgermeister Meisterburger.
I recall The Patriot being enjoyable, but I haven’t seen it in ages. So maybe Emmerich can make a historical drama? Maybe?
I lurved Midway (the bad movie, and the battle). The old boardgame Midway was one of my first forays into wargaming. Even if the stupid screen didn’t actually fit across the board properly.
That looks like it is Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid and Midway all in. The Midway part looks like they have stolen from the old Charlton Heston version. But the battle scenes look awesome. I would (maybe) see it for that. I find I can’t watch the recent Pearl Harbor movie for very long because of the soap opera crap they put in it.
When I first started watching the trailer I was totally confused as to my memory of the Midway battle and just what liberties they were going to take with civilians hanging around watching. Then I realized that if you’re gonna make a film about the WW2 Pacific Theater these days, you include everything! Every! Thing! If they can shove in the Japanese attack on the Aleutians I may lose it.
This is such a crazy statement to me. But different strokes.
I’d go the Kevin Feige route and choose somebody who knows how to tell a story. I’d choose S. Craig Zahler. Or Kelly Reichardt. Just watch Night Moves to see what I mean. I’d love to see what she would do with this.
You know he’s hardly the only one around here who didn’t care for Dunkirk. However, I doubt Emmerich is the kind of director who’s going to drill down (and get lost down there) as deeply as Nolan did. I’m more concerned about whether we’ll get the kind of hyperbolic fictional bullshit that was on display in Pearl Harbor or even the godawful '70s version of Midway.
Oh I understand that. I didn’t mean to be condescending. I was really taken with the movie, and surprised at how contained it was. It could have been a bloated three-hour movie, but Nolan really reined it in (I’m never sure how to spell that) and I loved the sort of time-dilation thing he did with the story. It took me a bit to get the hang of it–I’m not the sharpest bulb in the drawer sometimes–but once I did, I totally grooved on it.
Now I feel like I have to see that Peter Jackson World War 1 movie.
Midway was such a huge battle, in terms of geography, logistics and the number of seemingly isolated events that led up to its conclusion that “contained” is a huge challenge climatically. I’m dubious about Emmerich being able to make it relatable while also making the sequence of events understandable is to a general audience. I was not encouraged by the trailer giving us a whole lot of Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid and very little of the battle itself, although that doesn’t mean the finished movie will turn out that way.
The '70s movie tried to solve the relatable problem by giving us the fictional Charlton Heston character, his fictional son and the cringe-worthy fictional interracial romance. It wound up only distracting from the central story. And then they finished it off by killing the Heston character with stock footage of a jet crashing on a carrier. I can only hope Emmerich will improve on that.
