Movie Review: 'Midway' (2019)

Midway (2019)

Directed by: Roland Emmerich

Written by: Wes Tooke

Starring: Ed Skrein, Tadanobu Asano, Luke Evans, Etsushi Toyokawa, Aaron Eckhart, Jun Kunimura, Nick Jonas, Peter Shinkoda, Mandy Moore, Hiro Kanawaga, Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid

On Friday, November 8, Lionsgate released Midway, a $100 million war film written by Wes Tooke and directed by Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Patriot) that tells the story of the famed 1942 naval battle between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Pacific Fleet that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific in America's favor only six months after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Reportedly, the film, which is not so much a remake of Jack Smight's eponymous 1976 all-star mishmash of fact-based war action and soap opera-like fiction but rather a corrective re-interpretation, was a labor of love for the German filmmaker who gave us Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow, and The Patriot. Emmerich had pitched Midway to various studios since the early 1990s; however, none of the Big Six Hollywood studios (including Universal, which had produced the 1976 Midway film) wanted to shell out the $100 million Emmerich needed in order to recreate the various encounters between the Japanese and the Americans that culminated in the Battle of Midway (June 4-6, 1942).

Emmerich eventually convinced individual investors, as well as several Chinese investment companies, to finance his passion project. As a result, he wrangled a cast of actors from the U.S., Canada, China, and Japan to take on the roles of various participants, military and civilian, to tell the story of Midway from the American and Japanese perspectives.

As written by Wes Tooke, who has several TV writing credits in his CV and is making his feature film writing debut, Midway begins with a prologue set in 1937 Japan, a time in which Tokyo and Washington are still at peace but at loggerheads over the Japanese militarists' "adventurism" in China.

Consequently, in a scene designed to plant the seeds of the conflict to come, we are introduced to Lt. Commander Edwin T. Layton (Patrick Wilson), the assistance naval attache at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. At a social dinner between American, British, and Japanese naval officers, Layton and Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa), exchange polite but frank statements of their nations' respective stances regarding the various crises in the Pacific. Layton assures the Harvard-educated Yamamoto that the U.S. does not desire to be Japan's enemy but is dismayed by Tokyo's aggression in China; Yamamoto, for his part, warns Layton that if the U.S. cuts off sales of oil to the Empire, the result will be war.

Inevitably, war breaks out in 1941 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration freezes Japan's assets in the United States and imposes an oil embargo following the Japanese occupation of French Indochina (present-day Vietnam). Unwilling to lose face by withdrawing from China and feeling backed into a corner by Washington, the Japanese authorize Yamamoto to attack the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, hoping to inflict such a devastating blow on the Americans that they will seek peace rather than fight a long protracted war from one end of the Pacific to the other.

Midway gets underway with a set-piece recreation of the Japanese attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941, "a date." per Roosevelt's famous address asking Congress to declare war, "that will live in infamy." In a fast-paced yet visually impressive sequence, Emmerich introduces several of the historical characters, including Lt. Richard Best (Ed Skrein), a dive bomber pilot assigned to Bombing Six aboard the carrier USS Enterprise, who has to identify the charred corpse of his Naval Academy classmate Lt. Roy Pearce (Alexander Ludwig), who was killed aboard the battleship USS Arizona on that tragic morning.

Emmerich's brief Pearl Harbor opening also introduces us to Best's wife Anne (Mandy Moore) as a civilian eyewitness to the Japanese attack and other events in the leadup to the Battle of Midway. In cinematic terms, the Bests are the avatars for the audience, since their experiences over the next six months of the war are at the core of Midway. 

As devastating as the Pearl Harbor attack seems to be at the time, Yamamoto is disappointed when he learns that the surprise raid occurred before the Americans were handed a formal declaration of hostilities. "I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve," he says when he hears FDR's speech over the radio aboard his flagship, the Nagato.

Yamamoto is also left unsettled when Japanese intelligence informs him that the Pacific Fleet's carriers were not in Pearl Harbor during the attack, thus leaving the Americans with the ability to strike back at the Empire of the sun.  Knowing that Japan's chances of winning a long war against the industrial and military might of America are practically nil, Yamamoto must come up with a plan to lure the Pacific Fleet into a major decisive battle and destroy it while Japan still has naval supremacy in the Pacific Theater.

My Take

What happens next, of course, is a matter of historical record, so I'm not spoiling anything by pointing out that screenwriter Tooke and director Emmerich take the audience on a historically-accurate but rather quick-paced tour of duty that covers the first six months of the Pacific War, beginning with Yamamoto's decision to invade the U.S. outpost at Midway Atoll (the farthermost point of the Hawaiian Islands chain)  and use it as bait to draw out the remnants of the Pacific Fleet.

We also meet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Woody Harrelson), the newly appointed commander of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz is portrayed quite accurately as a calm, determined officer who keeps most of Admiral Kimmel's staff at their posts, including the Pacific Fleet's intelligence officer, Commander Layton, who blames himself for "the biggest intelligence failure in American history."

Nimitz is also determined to take the war to the enemy, so starting in February of 1942, he sends out Task Force 16, a naval group centered around the carrier Enterprise, on a series of raids around the periphery of Japan's new Pacific conquests. Commanded by Vice Admiral William F. Halsey (Dennis Quaid), this force harasses the Japanese in isolated bases in the Marshall Islands while at the same time giving the Navy's aviators valuable combat experience.

And even though Yamamoto's plan to attack Midway is approved several months before the event, the famous Doolittle Raid (April 18, 1942) spurs the Japanese on to their fateful sortie to conquer Midway by dispatching four of the six carriers that struck at Pearl Harbor as the Kido Butai (First Striking Force), tasked with the job of softening up the defenses at Midway and destroying the American carrier fleet once they dash out from Hawaii to rescue the U.S. outpost and its Navy/Marine Corps garrison.

Considering how complex and wide-ranging the Battle of Midway was, it's not surprising that Emmerich's film is a cross between a video game and a Cliff's Notes take on any of the newer non-fiction books about what Mitsuo Fuchida called "the battle that doomed Japan."

To be fair, Emmerich's Midway is a vast improvement over Universal Pictures' 1976 extravaganza. The new movie doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence by grafting on fictional characters or add sudsy soap opera romances laden with politically correct messaging over the inequity of interning Japanese Americans on the West Coast, which are two of the biggest sins committed by Jack Smight's version of Midway. 

The new Midway movie also benefits from the ability of digital artists to create visually accurate CGI graphics that depict American and Japanese aircraft and warships. This allowed Emmerich and his crew to avoid using battle scenes from other films set in the same period; here, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is not "borrowed" from either Tora! Tora! Tora! or Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. The air and naval battles in the 2019 Midway are all-new and exclusive to Emmerich's personal passion project.

Furthermore, this Midway is as historically accurate as a made-for-the-masses entertainment movie can be. Gone, for instance, are establishing shots of Japanese planes being readied for battle on crowded flight decks shortly before the American dive bombers arrived over Kido Butai. Midway buffs will be gratified to know that Emmerich consulted with various naval historians and show the Japanese flight decks mostly clear, except for the carriers' combat air patrol (CAP) fighters, while the arming of the bombers and torpedo planes takes place in the hangar deck below.

And yet, Midway depicts the various events, especially the aerial battles, as if Emmerich had hit a fast-forward button to compress the events of June 4, 1942 into a series of lightning-paced skirmishes.

To simplify the narrative of Midway for modern audiences, screenwriter Tooke skips over several important incidents that occurred both before and during the battle. The American attacks on the Invasion Force on the night of June 3 are not mentioned, and the various land-based and carrier-based American aerial strikes that took place between 8 and 10:20 AM are shown but in a tightly compressed time frame that blends some of the separate attacks into one sequence and omits others.

Also, for dramatic effect, the Douglas SBD-3 dive bombers shown in Midway are far nimbler and faster than their real-life counterparts. Here, Emmerich is hoping that we in the audience are so engrossed by the visuals that we can believe that the dumpy, slow Dauntlesses can dogfight with Mitsubishi Zero fighters. Well, as the Gershwin Brothers wrote in a song for Porgy and Bess, it ain't necessarily so.

Perhaps it's because Emmerich is aiming Midway at a younger crowd than Steven Spielberg's far more graphic Saving Private Ryan and angled for a PG-13 rating rather than the less desirable R, Midway is uncharacteristically bloodless for a movie about World War II. Most of the battle sequences have a video-game-like vibe; they've visually impressive but don't evoke any feelings of lost human lives. Planes and ships explode into flame spectacularly but with the exception of a few on-screen deaths, the action scenes are essentially improved versions of the title sequences from Slitherine Ltd.'s Order of Battle World War II computer games.

While I'm not clamoring for a version of Midway where we see sailors, Marines, and airmen suffer from third-degree burns or "bleed" gallons of simulated blood so that we leave the theater in need of PTSD counseling, the film is too antiseptic for its own good. The post-attack sequence where Dick Best has to identify his best friend's remains is a good example of how squeamish Tooke and Emmerich are in their reluctance to show what war looks like.

In this scene, we see several rows of what we know are dead sailors and officers from the battleship Arizona and other vessels that were sunk or damaged during the raid on December 7, 1941. They are covered in pristine, crisp white bedsheets, with nary a spot of blood on them.

Again, I'm not saying Midway should be a gore-fest, especially if you are a filmmaker who is trying to attract a wider audience than, say, that for Black Hawk Down or Hacksaw Ridge. 

But to show viewers a makeshift morgue full of corpses covered with sheets so clean that you can almost smell the scent of Clorox in the air...that's rather too antiseptic and pulls the savvy viewer from the movie.

Another issue I have with this Midway is one that I had with the 1976 film: its climax focuses solely on the events of June 4 and doesn't cover the sinkings of the USS Yorktown and the destroyer USS Hammann by a Japanese submarine two days later.

While I understand that the screenplay had to be tight and that covering the entire battle requires more screentime than Midway's 138 minutes, those ships' fates, as well as those of a Japanese cruiser division that was badly mauled by American aircraft in the battle's denouement, could have been mentioned in the film's coda. The 1976 film only showed the Yorktown's being damaged by Japanese air attacks; I was hoping that Emmerich's Midway would at least tell viewers that the Pacific Fleet lost one carrier (and an escorting destroyer) after a determined effort to save her.

Still, this version of Midway is worth a watch. There are no fictitious characters in this film, and even though much of the dialogue is invented, a great deal of it comes from non-fiction accounts of the Battle of Midway.