![]() The film’s drama is B-movie basic, but the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes “Midway” a picture worth seeing.Īs storytelling, however, it’s just okay (though it’s more streamlined than the cluttered, cliché-strewn 1976 version of “Midway”). In that light, if you want to know what it was like to fight in World War II (and that’s certainly one reason we go to a war film - to get a direct taste of the experience, at least as much as that’s possible in a movie-theater seat), a film like “Midway” can be said to serve a higher purpose. It established a new bar - a bullet-ripping, napalm-choking existential reality. The astonishing authenticity of contemporary war cinema that began, in a major way, with the Hollywood Vietnam films didn’t just set the bar higher. ![]() There are prestige war films, like “Full Metal Jacket” or “Saving Private Ryan” or “Platoon” or “The Hurt Locker.” There are popcorn war films that reduce historical events to a kind of action catnip, like the Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer “Pearl Harbor” or Clint Eastwood’s demagogic Iraq War exploitation drama “American Sniper.” And then there are movies like “Midway,” which are large-scale commercial entertainments designed to amaze you with their stuff-blowing-up bravura, but that bring it all off in a way that’s more responsible than not.Īs blasphemous as it may be to admit, I have a difficult time watching old WWII movies like “The Longest Day” or “They Were Expendable,” since the combat effects, to my eyes, look so primitive that they can seem like something taking place on a Broadway stage. (That’s why some of the film’s battle scenes have a tinge of awe.) But the message of “Midway” is that this is what it took to save civilization. To call these pilots brave would be an understatement - it’s almost impossible to believe they had the stones to do this. And the movie allows us to take the measure of every action. For all the chaos, the attacks occur with blinding clarity in the sunlit sky (as the Battle of Midway indeed did). We see all this from the pilot’s vertiginous point-of-view, where it looks like a roller-coaster drop from hell, as showers of enemy gunfire shoot up from the carrier.
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