Midway (2019) review

 I wanted to like this film. Actually I wanted to tell you that this is the best WWII movie since Tora! Tora! Tora! (quickly checks Wikipedia to make sure the other obvious contender, Patton, came out before TTT - it did).

But...

Eh, it was all right. 

Let's start with what it is: a competently-made and competently-acted film about the roughly six months between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway. Even though the title is Midway, we don't get to the titular battle until about halfway through, and then it feels like the actual battle parts are over awfully quickly.

I thought that perhaps the film was required to a) come in under a certain runtime (roughly two hours; short for a Classic Seventies War Epic Done With Modern CGI that it clearly was aiming to be) and b) have the Doolittle subplot to put a scene in China and get Chinese funding. These two requirements, taken in tandem, hamstrung the film. Every second we spend on Doolittle (an impeccable Aaron Eckhardt) is a second we're not spending on the poorly-articulated main characters.

A common criticism of Tora! Tora! Tora! is that every character is a one-note caricature because the film has so many characters that it just can't give any of them depth despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime. But it did a significantly better job of it than Midway, which is only six minutes shorter (this shocked me, hence the crossed-out line in the previous paragraph) and spends far less time on the Japanese side (again, Midway is a Chinese co-production, rather than a Japanese one). Midway feels shorter than it is, because... because there's not much there. In trying to do too much, they have only succeeded in doing too little.

Part of the problem is due to the difference in characterization this time around. Tora! Tora! Tora! gave us the Japanese perspective primarily through the eyes of Isoroku Yamamoto ("cautious") and Mitsuo Fuchida ("eager"). Midway's main Japanese character, to the extent that it has one, is Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi ("hero-worships Yamamoto and thinks Vice Admiral Nagumo is a fuckup"). Notice the one-note character beats in the parentheses there. One of these things is significantly harder to act than the others, especially since Yamaguchi spends the majority of his screentime on the bridge of the Hiryu, where neither of those other admirals step foot. And I'm not saying Yamaguchi's actor is bad, he's just... not given enough to do. Over on the American side, we got OG Daario from Game of Thrones (Ed Skrein, who does a fine job aside from a questionable accent that makes him sound like every high school bully ever; stop hiring foreigners to play Americans) and a bunch of interchangeable dark-haired white boys. The shallow characterization from Tora! Tora! Tora! is now sub-anemic.

The other major problem is that the film doesn't cover one event. We start with a Pearl Harbor sequence that corrects my presumption about how long it took the USS Arizona to sink (this film's historical accuracy deserves plenty of praise), then we have a raid on the Marshall Islands, then we have the Doolittle Raid and the aftermath, and then we get to Midway. And yes it's true that Tora! Tora! Tora! didn't get to December 7th until just before its intermission (remember those?), but the lack of action sequences up until that point made the film feel less crowded and allowed us to spend more time with the characters.

Perhaps the most jarring example of the compromises this film was obviously forced to make regarding its runtime occurs at the end of the Marshall Islands sequence. Best (Skrein)'s Dauntless is flying through the clouds, having just shot down one Zero. It's attacked from the side by another Zero, which flies past. Best then says something to the effect of "let's go home" to his gunner, and the scene ends. And then he's back on the Enterprise. What??!?

What I did like: as I said, it's competently-acted, and my bitching about Skrein's accent aside, there are no problems with the cast. (Mark Rolston shows up as CNO Ernest J. King - guy never hit the big time, but he's outstanding in anything he's in.) The level of historical accuracy is amazing, especially considering it's from the same guy who did The Patriot. (Akagi and Hiryu have their island towers on the port side!* If you know anything about WWII battleships, you'll recognize the Yamato the instant it appears on screen! Bruno Gaido really did shoot down an enemy suicide bomber** from the back seat of a parked Dauntless! An American really did try to suicide-bomb the Akagi at Midway! and so on.)

*Tora! Tora! Tora! couldn't do this because it used the Yorktown (CV-10; its predecessor, CV-05, was sunk immediately after, uh, Midway) as a stand-in for the Akagi, and Yorktown, like all aircraft carriers not named Akagi and Hiryu, has its tower on the starboard side.

**not a kamikaze. A kamikaze knows he's not coming back when he takes off. Both the incidents that I call "suicide bombing" are attempts by pilots of a badly-damaged plane to crash into something.

The CGI is crap, and that's sad, but that and the accents and the weird pacing are distractions. I give it a solid B.