Cool.
It was during a world war. What do you want them to say? You don’t think people spoke like that during WW2. or WW1. Geez man, get a clue. Midway occurred within 6 months of Pearl Harbor.
Saw it this afternoon, better than Pearl Harbor for whatever faint praise that might be (the melodrama in that just sinks an already not good movie).
Midway is definitely not a Good Movie in the classic sense, but as a quasi throwback to the kinds of war films you saw in 1946 or so, I appreciated it on some level. If you told me they had created a fully CGI Van Johnson and Audie Murphy to star in this movie, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I used to watch those old WW2 movies a lot as a kid because my father stopped channel flipping the moment he came across one. Midway feels like it shamelessly steals from all the movies AMC shows on a Veterans Day weekend marathon. Some of the CGI is a little weak tea, some of it is pretty solid, and it tries to squeeze in as many factoid nuggets as it can from 1937 until the character summaries that tell you where everyone ended up after the story ends. It’s not trying to be campy in any way, it’s just trying to be “the lead is straight out of Jersey and his best friend is as southern as a chiseled jaw can get.”
Again, not a Good Movie ™, but it brought me back to some of those old flicks I used to stumble across with my Dad back in the day.
“Midway” the original with Chuck Heston and etc (1973?) was excellent if somewhat dramatic on the ground. Fairly accurate as well.
I didn’t bother with the new one. It looked super dumb. Was it actually sorta half-good?
Tora Tora Tora holds up very nicely. In my opinion, you are right. “Midway” (a few years later) took a lotta of those scenes and mashed em together.
That said like I mentioned the older Midway --with its inevitable dramatic points on the ground – holds up well and is fairly accurate. I am tempted to watch the new one just to see it but … it was such an important, serious battle I hate to trivialize it into a lame o fall movie release that didn’t do well.
People watch this stuff who otherwise might remain totally ignorant of WWII.
The battle scenes were fairly accurate, with some heavy discounting for the indiscriminate use of old newsreel footage. I thought the best thing about the '70s Midway movie was its even more accurate portrayal of the strategic planning on both sides and that one terrific scene where the Japanese on the carrier Hiryu grimly watch the other three Japanese carriers burning. That said, I thought that movie was ruined by placing Chuck Heston’s fictional character at the center of the film, wasting a good third of the film by putting him in the middle of a cringe-worthy interracial love story and then killing him off with newsreel footage of a jet crashing on a carrier.
I completely agree with all of that. That said there was that great scene when the dive bombers hit the Japanese carriers and the light glistened off their wings --I am looking for the quote about it but I thought is was “waterfall”. The old midway movie did that justice.
The drama in the movie and Chuck Heston storyline was distracting and sort of dumb of course. But breaking the code, Spruance, the flights, the arming problems on the dauntless, the Japanese planning and decisionmaking. A lot of good stuff that was true made it into that movie.
I recall a lot of footage re-used from Tora Tora Tora which, overwall, was a better movie.
There was a lot of luck in that battle… and a ton of heroism. Can you imagine flying 150 miles over open water to try and find --let alone bomb --an enemy fleet?
I am not sure I agree with everything in that article (above) but the “silver waterfall” of dive-bombers attacking … that is still a romantic moment in that battle.