Midway Review (2019)

Midway Review (2019)
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writer: Wes Tooke
Starring: Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Luke Evans, Dennis Quaid, Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore, Darren Criss
Release Date: November 8, 2019

Roland Emmerich directing a World War II film isn’t exactly a sentence that inspires confidence. This is the man responsible for Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, films that treat spectacle as a substitute for everything else. That’s not a knock on Emmerich, I actually enjoy those films, Stargate, and a lot of his stuff in general. He’s just not someone I’d expect a sprawling war epic from. So when Midway was announced with Emmerich at the helm I was skeptical, and when the mixed reviews landed in November 2019 I filed it away as probably not worth my time.

I was wrong to do that, and I suspect a lot of people made the same mistake. Like I said, I generally like Emmerich, and I shouldn’t have doubted him. It’s not fantastic by any stretch, but good enough to land in the tenth spot on my Top 10 War Movies Worth Watching This Memorial Day article.

Midway covers the first six months of America’s involvement in the Pacific Theater of World War II, opening with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and building toward the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the naval engagement that historians generally consider the turning point of the entire Pacific War. The Japanese navy, riding a wave of dominance after Pearl Harbor, planned to seize Midway Island and draw out the remaining American fleet for a decisive blow. What they ran into instead was a combination of superior intelligence work, reckless American courage, and a few crucial moments of luck that turned the tide of the war in three days of fighting.

The film follows two main threads. The first centers on Lieutenant Dick Best, a naval aviator flying dive bombers off the USS Enterprise, played by Ed Skrein with a swagger that occasionally tips into abrasiveness but mostly works for the character. Best is the kind of pilot who pushes everything to the limit, not always easy to root for, but undeniably compelling to watch. The second thread follows Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton, the intelligence officer played by Patrick Wilson, who is the quiet engine of the whole film. Layton’s work breaking Japanese communication codes is what gives the American navy any chance at all in this fight, and Wilson plays the pressure of that responsibility with a restrained intensity that earns every scene he is in.

The supporting cast is deep and mostly solid. Woody Harrelson as Admiral Chester Nimitz is a slightly unconventional choice that works better than you would expect. Dennis Quaid as Admiral Halsey has a naturally salty authority that fits the role perfectly. Aaron Eckhart shows up as Jimmy Doolittle for the raid on Tokyo sequence and makes a strong impression in limited screen time. Even Nick Jonas, who I had no expectations for whatsoever, turns in a quiet and believable performance as Bruno Gaido, a gunner whose real life story involves one of the most audacious acts of individual bravery in the entire battle.

Some of the complaints about the film are not entirely unfair. The dialogue is functional rather than inspired, and there are moments where characters say things that feel like they were written to explain the plot to the audience rather than to each other. Ed Skrein’s accent drifts occasionally in ways that are distracting. And the CGI, while mostly impressive during the aerial combat sequences, does tip into video game territory a few times, particularly in some of the wider establishing shots. When critics said this, they were not wrong.

But here is what I think those critics got wrong. Midway isn’t trying to be Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down. It isn’t a ground level survival film built around intimate character moments. It’s an old fashioned war epic in the tradition of The Longest Day, a film that is trying to capture the full scope of a massive historical event across multiple locations and perspectives simultaneously. Judged on those terms, it does its job better than it was given credit for. The Battle of Midway sequences are tense and well staged. The film honors both sides of the fight without turning the Japanese commanders into cartoonish villains, which takes some discipline for a film in this genre. And the core facts are largely accurate, a claim backed up by actual military historians and veterans who praised the film for getting the details right where Pearl Harbor and the 1976 version of Midway both fumbled.

What Emmerich deserves real credit for is caring enough to make this film at all. No major studio would touch it. He spent years trying to get it financed, eventually raising the entire hundred million dollar budget independently. That is not the behavior of a director cynically cashing a paycheck. Whatever its flaws, Midway exists because somebody genuinely wanted to tell this story about a battle that deserves to be remembered, and that intention shows on screen.

It isn’t a perfect film, or even a great one. The script needed another pass and a couple of the performances are uneven. But Midway is a solid, respectful, and often thrilling account of one of the most consequential naval battles in history, and the audience that actually showed up to see it gave it an A on CinemaScore while critics were writing it off. Of course movie-going audiences like us and the mainstream critics have never had great overlap anyway.

Worth watching. Worth reassessing if you skipped it the first time.

Midway gets a three out of five: SUBSTANTIAL