So, I found myself hanging around a shopping center this afternoon and went to the theater to see “Midway”….
What can I say … It was certainly better than that crappy Ben Affleck Pearl Harbor movie a few years back. But that’s a pretty low bar to meet. To my mind, the best movie about the Pacific War remains “Tora, Tora, Tora”, which decades later still looks damn awful good as well as getting all the detailed history right—with the bonus of presenting the war from both the American and the Japanese point of view. “Midway” doesn’t reach that bar.
The first part of the movie gives a recap of the events leading up to the battle: Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, which I suppose is necessary because Americans are on the whole utterly pig-ignorant about our own history. There is also what I thought was an overly long excursion into the Doolittle Raid (just like that crappy Ben Affleck Pearl Harbor movie a few years back) and its aftermath in China. For me, the mystery of this lengthy dip into the China war was solved when I remembered that the movie was co-produced by a Chinese movie company, and in Beijing the memory of the Japanese occupation is still raw and still has current political implications (China has several territorial conflicts with almost a dozen nations in the South China Sea, for example, but the most intense of them is with Japan). So this whole portion of the movie is essentially nationalist propaganda aimed at the audience in the Chinese market.
The movie gets the strictly historical stuff pretty well right. It’s not hard to see that the producers didn’t know diddley about how actual WW2 air combat worked—but I suppose that accuracy was all sacrificed for visual effect, and indeed the movie’s battle scenes are visually spectacular. I just had to keep reminding myself that, after all, it’s not a documentary.