Naval battles are the most difficult historical events to be properly reconstructed on big screen. They require immense financial resources, creativity and ability to simplify complicated manuevres and tactics involving dozens of ships and thousands of participants without direct contact into watchable dramatic spectacle. Some of those difficulties are quite apparent in Midway, 1976 war epic directed by Jack Smight.
The plot deals with Battle of Midway, one of the most important events in Second World War. It begins in April 1942, few months after attack on Pearl Harbor which destroyed most of US Pacific Fleet and allowed Japanese to conquer large sections of Asia and Pacific. Admiral Isoroko Yamamoto (played by Toshiro Mifune), commander on Japanese Imperial Navy, knows that time isn’t on his side and that the Americans would, through their industrial might, compensate their early losses and eventually win by sheer force of numbers. The only way to prevent this is bold and decisive strike designed to destroy the last remaining major US naval force – aircraft carriers USS Enterprise, USS Hornet and USS Yorktown – and thus shock Americans into accepting peace treaty under Japanese terms. Yamamoto has devised very complicated plan which requires large invasion force to attack small island of Midway, important American base west of Hawaii, and thus lure American carriers into the sea where they would be destroyed by Japanese superior carrier force commanded by Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (played by James Shigeta). Japanese are unaware that the team of US naval cryptographers led by Commander Joseph Rochefort (played by Hal Holbrook) have broken Japanese code and are aware of Yamamoto’s plan. Admiral Chester Nimitz (played by Henry Fonda), commander of Pacific Fleet sends the ships under command of Admiral Spruance (played by Glenn Ford) and Admiral Fletcher (played by Robert Webber) to set up an ambush for Japanese and try striking the enemy with their carrier-based planes before the enemy discovers them.
The biggest problem for creators of Midway - how to portray battle that plays out over hundreds of miles of ocean and features dozens of ships and hundreds of planes – is solved with the use of subtitles that identify various locations, times, ships and historical personalities, sometimes repeatedly in order to avoid any confusion among the audience. So, the audience doesn’t have problems of understanding what is going on and the script by Donald S. Sanford treats historical facts with reasonable dose of accuracy. Unfortunately, when it comes to showing what is going on, limitations of production, like relatively low budget, become quite obvious. Even with the help of US Navy, producers could use only single aircraft carrier which stood for various American and Japanese vessels. Situation was even worse with planes – there were only three available, obviously not enough for reconstruction of dogfights and air attacks. Producers of Midway then simply reused footage originally produced for much more expensive war epics like Tora! Tora! Tora! and Battle of Britain, but even that wasn’t enough, so in many cases they used authentic WW2-era footage, often poorly edited and resulting in anachronisms and mistakes that would be revolting for WW2 buffs. Even with those flaws, Midway would have worked, but scriptwriters decided to “spice up” real history and real personalities with two fictional characters – Captain Garth (played by Charlton Heston) and his son Lieutenant Thomas Garth (played by Edward Albert) who serve on the same ship and are involved in completely redundant subplot about Thomas being in love with Japanese American girl (played by terribly miscast Christina Kokubo) suspected of aiding the enemy. Despite that, Midway made decent profit at the box-office, which is quite ironic in light of Ronald Emmerich’s 2019 Midway failing at the box-office despite being significantly better film.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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