Midway: Total War

1942 was a year of reckoning for the Axis Powers.  It was the year when Germany lost the initiative (if not the war) in the hellish rubbles of Stalingrad.  Just a few months earlier in the Pacific, Japan was dealt a blow she never recovered from in a decisive naval and air battle over a 2.4-square mile atoll called Midway, a major showdown pitting the might of the imperial Japanese navy (IJN) in its heyday and the legendary Harvard‑educated strategist Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto against a reeling US Navy still licking its wounds in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.  Schlocky B-movie director and producer Roland Emmerich (‘Independence Day,’ ‘Stargate,’ ‘The Day After Tomorrow’) updates the 1976 movie starring Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda with the latest advances in computer imagery and moviemaking technique, bringing this exciting “battle of the carriers” to life as we’ve never seen before.

 

‘Midway’ is what I would call an “old-fashioned” war movie, the kind that rugged Hollywood leading men like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum used to star in.  With its "Who’s Who?" ensemble cast including Ed Skrein, Luke Evans, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, Aaron Eckhart and one of the Jonas brothers, ‘Midway’ is a robust and full-blooded modern war epic, packed with enough “Top Gun” machismo and aerial derring-do featuring SBD Dauntlesses and TBF Avengers to make a giddy 10-year old boy grab his WWII model airplane and run out of the house waving it around making engine noises.

 

With action as its main bread-and-butter rather than storytelling or strong characterizations (the history isn’t deep and the characters are only thinly sketched), it’s not surprising that ‘Midway’ isn’t enamored by the critics (42 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but that's like faulting something for being true to itself.  What we have here is a solid action-driven WWII war movie from the same guy who gave us 'Independence Day' so many years ago, unencumbered by forced romantic subplots ('Pearl Harbor,' anyone?) and contrived characters.  It is a simple movie set in a simpler time during which things were more black and white than it is today.

Grade: A-