#258: Midway
Roland Emmerich sure knows how to put on a show
This review was originally posted to Twitter on May 26, 2020.
Initial release: November 8, 2019
Director: Roland Emmerich
Every war has its critical moments. Sometimes they’re very small, like assassinating a key official. Sometimes they’re much bigger, bordering on apocalyptic in scale. So yeah welcome to Roland Emmerich’s Midway, a high-octane explosion-fest about the Battle of Midway.
After Pearl Harbor the United States needed a win. The Doolittle raid had been a major morale boost, but the Battle of the Coral Sea had ended in a draw and the loss of the Philippines had been a major shock. With only three carriers in the pacific, things looked dicey for the US. While the carriers had luckily been nowhere near Pearl Harbor during the attack, Imperial Japan was already planning an operation to lure them into a trap and destroy them. However, cryptographers had already decoded part of Japanese transmissions, learning of the plan. This gave the US Navy an opportunity to create an ambush of their own, luring the Imperial Japanese carrier group — all of them participants in Pearl Harbor — into its own trap in one of the most intense naval air battles of the war.
The result: decisive Allied victory.
All four Imperial Japanese carriers were sunk, as well as a heavy cruiser. For its part, the US lost one carrier — the already-damaged Yorktown, pressed into service after a marathon 72-hour drydock session — and a destroyer. But the US had struck a mighty blow. The Battle of Midway stands to this day as one of the most important engagements of the entire war. By almost any standard, it was an important turning conflict in the Pacific Theater, giving the US the strategic initiative, a chance to get off the ropes. As you might expect from an event of this magnitude, it’s since been the subject of quite a few works, from books, to documentaries, to, of course, feature films. A 1976 film, also titled Midway, was a poor attempt at a realistic portrayal in the vein of Tora! Tora! Tora! Emmerich’s film is a modern take, using techniques unheard of in 1976 to create an intense fireworks show. We’re treated to dizzying first-person shots of dive-bombs on Imperial Japanese carriers in between a tale of the men on both sides who would shape history. We get daring heroes like Dick Best, a cocky daredevil and borderline maniac who bombed two carriers in a single day; larger-than-life figures like Admirals Chester A. Nimitz and Isoroku Yamamoto; and a big cast of lesser-known but still important personnel.
What makes this film, for me, is how colorful it is: lots of blues and reds and oranges; it lacks the washed-out look that a lot of war movies, especially recent ones, have. Shunning the “real is brown” trope, Emmerich has created a visually arresting film.
Though I was skeptical as to whether this was actually a Roland Emmerich film given that it was only two hours, this is an Emmerich film through and through: big, loud, and international, with multiple ongoing storylines, some coming together, others not. The first half of the film is a recap of the early months of the war, starting with Pearl Harbor (say the line, Yamamoto!) then a glossing over of the Battle of the Coral Sea, a brief detour to cover the Doolittle raid and its aftermath, and then finally the buildup to Midway. Pearl Harbor of course gets the most coverage in the early part of the film, focusing on a single character, Roy Pearce, a friend of Dick Best’s and watch officer aboard the doomed USS Arizona. (he doesn’t survive, which plays nicely into a revenge-driven Best’s cowboy persona.)
Opposite Best we get Edwin Layton, an intelligence officer who works alongside an army of cryptographers to decode Imperial Japanese transmissions and try to make sense of the bits and pieces the data unveils, ultimately being the one to predict where and when they would strike. We also are treated to lengthy sequences involving the Imperial Japanese Navy; while pilots occasionally get a few (wordless) closeups, the majority of the screen time is reserved for commanders, who argue about just how brave the US really is.
This film isn’t just about the Americans who participated in the battle; it’s about everybody, and in fact the film is dedicated to both American and Japanese servicemen who fought in the battle. “The sea remembers its own” reads the epitaph at the end, just before the credits.
I’m not going to say this is a smart film. Emmerich films rarely are. But it is a good film, a crazy intense heart attack machine that brings the Battle of Midway to life in a way that only Emmerich could have. In a way, it’s the perfect subject for him. It avoids a lot of the emotional manipulation of the Spielberg model, preferring to focus on high-octane air battles and the teeth-rattling tension of protracted divebombs. While I adore Dunkirk’s minimalist dogfights, Emmerich’s “go big or go home” philosophy works too.
