Very well put.
Oddly, you kind of make me remember watching Tora! Tora! Tora! with my dad when it showed up on TV at some point in my childhood. I wonder if that holds up.
-xtien
It holds up very well historically, but not so much dramatically. The problem is kind of the opposite of Dunkirk.There’s virtually no drilling down to the individual characters – They play their parts in the historical pattern, entering and leaving the stage as called for by the timeline, but we don’t learn anything about them. The result is pretty much an acted-out documentary.
For the record, you spelled it correctly, because a horse is controlled with reins and not reigns, which are the periods during which kings/queens/emperors etc. rule. THANK YOU.
Anyway, this is coming out next Friday. Any word yet on whether it sucks?
Notwithstanding my struggles with grognards thread about the Japanese threat during the early part of 1942 --this movie looks like crap. The older movie is close-ish to historical reality. This looks like a cartoon version.
Let’s not forget how close the Japanese came to creating a huge sphere of influence all over the pacific… and how terrible we were prepared to face it (we being the US). I can’t imagine this move being good at all…
Lol, Tora tora tora actually hold up pretty well. Watch that instead.
Aside from what will no doubt be the soap opera personal stuff included in the movie (but then the original had all that stuff too), the only big negative to me appears to be that they are trying to fit three events into one movie, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid and then the actual battle of Midway. Unless this thing is going to be 4 hours long something is going to get shorted.
Ha ha for some reason I read that as Woody Allen and my mind was blown.
It’s guaranteed to be worse -it’s Roland Emmerich!
Elaborate
Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the Japanese air strike against Pearl Harbor, was forced to sit out the Midway operation aboard the Akagi due to an emergency appendectomy en route. He wrote an eye witness account of the battle after the war called “Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan.” For decades that book was considered the definitive source of the Japanese side of the battle. But some historians, at least, had doubts about the veracity of some of his assertions, particularly his claim that American dive bombers struck just as the Japanese strike vs the American carriers was about to launch. In 2007, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully published “Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway” ( a great book btw) in which, using translations of the Japanese log books, the timing between events and Japanese Imperial Navy doctrine, they debunked that claim as well as others. It seems Fuchida basically made stuff up for dramatic effect.
The uncritical repetition of the myths about Midway in the American literature has always been a sore point with me, and not just the repetition of Fuchida’s. One that I find most irritating is the myth surrounding what came to be known as the Koga or Akutan Zero.
Petty officer Tadayoshi Koga and his Zero fighter were part of the ill-considered Japanese diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands. Koga’s Zero developed engine trouble and he attempted to make a forced landing on the unihabited island of Akutan, but his landing gear stuck in the soft ground, flipping the Zero over and killing him. His plane, however, remained intact. It was discovered by the Americans and retrieved in July 1942, restored to flying condition and yield much valuable information.
The myth, repeated uncritically in Prange’s book, is that American aircraft designers “rushed to their drawing boards” and abra acadbra produced the Grumman F6F Hellcat, the plane that conquered the Zero. The problem with this scenario is that the Hellcat prototype made its first fight about three weeks after the Battle of Midway and two weeks before the Americans discovered Koga’s Zero. The truth is that Koga’s plane yielded good info about the Zero’s strengths and weaknesses, which American pilots incorporated into their tactics.
I don’t expect any of this to make into the upcoming movie, which, from what I can deduce from the previews, delves a lot into events leading up to the battle, but probably not so much afterward. In any case, I hope it sticks more closely to the historical record that previous efforts.
The captured Zero was also supposed to have influenced fighter tactics over Guadalcanal the following fall, which was also shown to be mostly inaccurate.
I don’t see this film, directed someone who has helmed some of the worst disaster films ever, featuring a mythbusting kind of story. The only thing impressive about it is that it was basically independently financed (at $125 million).
— Alan
Chris Roberts laughs.
Why does Hollywood keep giving Emerich piles of money to make these things he calls movies…
The battle of Midway deserves better.
I’m not a World War II fighter plane historian, but I’ve seen a lot of footage and read a lot of books on the Pacific and the action sequences in the trailers don’t look remotely close to plausible. It actually looks ridiculous and over-the-top, and laughable and insulting all at the same time.
Seems like yet another Hollywood … screw 11, lets turn it up to 12 now!! Sigh. Waiting on what I expect to be poor reviews.
Reviews coming in, almost all negative. Mostly stating ridiculous battle sequences, wooden characters, poor script, and yet another CGI-Fest.
Shame considering the material. I don’t know why directors lean more towards ridiculous action instead of giving us something that plausible. I’m really tired of this crap.
From the trailers, this looks like right-wing jingoistic bullshit to me. Definitely won’t be seeing.
Tora Tora still holds up nicely imo.
Wow. So how do you get from WW2 after Pearl Harbor to “right wing jingositic bullshit” so fast? Did you ever see the first Midway movie, I guess the multi-racial love affair makes that an acceptable movie?
Why read politics into what will probably be on overdone CGI fest of a WW2 battle? We were fighting the Japanese, not the Mexicans or the Chinese. Now if they remake the Alamo or The Sand Pebbles you may be onto something.
By listening to the dialogue, that’s how.
They might as well be standing around yelling “America, Fuck Yeah!”
Whatever else is right or wrong with the movie, friends who have seen it tell me this is not a problem. The Japanese aircraft are still being rearmed on the hangar decks, as actually was the case when the American dive bombers struck, and are not a second away from launching their strike as Fuchida claimed.