Midway: Minus monsters and aliens, Roland Emmerich puts the boom in naval battle

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-

After a career of repeatedly destroying the world, from Independence Day to The The Day After Tomorrow to 2012, it’s surprising that Roland Emmerich has never made a real-life war movie before Midway.

Read our interview with Roland Emmerich

No aliens or monsters or preposterous disaster scenarios are needed to excuse excess. The movie, which moves from Pearl Harbor to the retaliatory Doolittle Raid on Tokyo to the three-day turning point battle near the Midway atoll in June, 1942, automatically comes with the sinking of aircraft carriers and battleships, blazing aerial dogfights and vertigo-inducing dive-bombing.

After leading a bombing raid on Tokyo, Jimmy Doolittle parachutes into Chinese territory in Midway.

On the sliding scale of war movies, Emmerich’s Midway is obviously no prestige film like The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan. It belongs more to the school of the original Midway, with Tora! Tora! Tora! as its exemplar. Tell the story of a battle, offer up some sketched-out characters, played with aplomb, add a dash of soap opera and fire when ready.

On that scale, for what it’s worth, Midway is a much more solid piece of entertainment than the Pearl Harbor directed by Emmerich’s fellow master-of-disaster Michael Bay.

And, to his credit, Emmerich and writer Wes Tooke seem at least somewhat more committed to accuracy than when the Earth was flash-frozen in The Day After Tomorrow. The actual names of key figures are represented and events are more-or-less chronologically accurate (although bona fide war buffs will undoubtedly demur).

These square-jawed characters, who could come straight off a commemorative coin, include Admiral Chester Nimitz (Woody Harrelson), aircraft carrier Enterprise commanders William “Bull” Halsey (Dennis Quaid) and Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance (Jake Weber), with Aaron Eckhart as the aforementioned Lt. Comm. Jimmy Doolittle.

Midway is a movie with unusual provenance, a WWII film about a crucial Japanese defeat, directed by a German filmmaker with Chinese investment. The latter explains the time devoted to following Doolittle’s bail-out over China, and his being smuggled through Japanese lines by Chinese guerillas.

But it’s worth noting that, of the historical characters, there’s a sympathetic portrait of Admiral Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa), whose famous apocryphal quote about Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve,” makes its appearance at a war meeting here.

Yamamoto’s warnings of Japan’s feeling boxed-in to the point of imperialist expansion by its need for imported American oil are relayed in Midway’s opening to his friend, intelligence chief Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson), who makes it his mission to warn the U.S. Government in the years that follow.

His warnings about Pearl Harbor having gone unheeded, he produces intel from his team of code-breakers that suggests Japan is about to strike a blow against Midway. Again, Washington doesn’t believe him – but Nimitz does.

Again, this is all reasonably accurate, but for the Hollywood flourishes. That last bomb or torpedo left is invariably the one that sinks the Japanese ship (and Emmerich goes out of his way to show American ordinance totally and repeatedly missing its targets, which is something you don’t see in most war movies).

But the narrative core of the film is a Top Gun story between cocky real life dive bombers Dick Best (Ed Skrein) and Wade McClusky (Luke Evans). Between them, the war is one big pissing match, which is the most Hollywood thing about Emmerich’s movie.

As for the CG effects (which are already bugging some war buffs I know, from the trailer alone), there is no realistic option, with WWII-era planes and aircraft carriers being in short supply these days. Granted, it is a little much to see a plane fly into the explosion between two enemy fighters and come out the other side unscathed, but that’s how action films are shot these days.

Midway. Directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Wes Tooke. Stars Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson and Ed Skrein. Opens wide, Friday, November 8.