Mark Reviews Movies: MIDWAY (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2019

The story can't really start with the Battle of Midway, and screenwriter Wes Tooke is knowledgeable enough to know that fact. Although the full story of the War in the Pacific doesn't end there, either, Tooke has chosen a vital conflict during World War II to serve as this tale's climax. The movie, of course, is called Midway, and it attempts to put the eponymous battle—in which American naval and air forces took their Japanese counterparts by surprise—into a broader context is admirable.

Director Roland Emmerich doesn't see this story in the same way, though. No, the director of big-budget spectacles simply sees an opportunity to put another spectacle under his belt. In its final form, the movie is a series of action setpieces, interrupted by strategic debates and the most basic attempts to give its key heroes a personal side.

One of biggest issues with this approach is that Tooke, although smart enough to understand that we need some background before we get to the island and the waters near it, isn't up to the task of making his characters into anything more than broad archetypes. His screenplay's main protagonist, for example, is Lieutenant Richard "Dick" Best (Ed Skrein), a Navy pilot who is repeatedly called "cocky," because that's all there really is to him.

Skrein does either a fine job playing an unsympathetic hero or a poor job playing a man's whose inherent skills are meant to forgive his abrasive personality. As written or as performed, the character just remains a guy whose ego and attitude overshadow large sections of this movie.

No number of scenes with his worried-wife-at-home Anne (Mandy Moore) or trying to show that he has become a real leader can correct that impression. The material with the wife is the generic stuff of so many stories, and by the time Best becomes a leader, Emmerich has taken full control with the extended battle. The other characters fare both worse and better—worse, because they're not even granted any development beyond where they start, and better, because Tooke just has them playing out the strategy debates.

The most significant side player, perhaps, is Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson), an intelligence officer with the Navy. In the movie's opening scenes, meets with Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) in Japan, just a few years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is the first of the movie's four main action sequences.

Layton believes he didn't do enough to warn the base's commanding officer about the probability of an attack, and after, as the United States enters another world war, he promises not to make the same mistake with Pearl Harbor's new commander Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Woody Harrelson), who, like so many of these supporting characters, is simply here to explain things.

Some of those others include Lieutenant Colonel James "Jimmy" Doolittle (Aaron Eckhart), of the self-named air raid on Tokyo (who disappears from the story once his job is finished), and Admiral William "Bull" Halsey (Dennis Quaid), who's gruff and to-the-point before developing shingles and being sent from his fleet for medical care. In a somewhat daring move, Tooke shows the perspectives of Yamamoto, who warned others that any attack on the U.S. would have to be decisive, and Admiral Chūichi Nagumo (Jun Kunimura), who is leading the Japanese superiority of the Pacific. The roles of those on the other side of the conflict are about the same as their American counterparts—underwritten and presented with the single-minded purpose of providing exposition.

The pilots with, at first, and, later, under Best don't offer much more, but they are present for most of the action (They're played by the likes of Luke Evans—as the man who doesn't think Best is up to the task of leadership, before he suddenly does for no particular reason—and Nick Jonas—as a brash, brave pilot with a New York accent). For all of the discussion about tactics before the story's major battles, Emmerich's direction is mostly about giving us isolated moments, absent any of the context that has been established.

In that regard, the movie does end up feeling like an excuse to sequences of daring, punctuated by plenty of explosions. The overwhelming majority of such sequences—to the point that one wonders if anything other than the actors is actually real in a considerable number of shots—are founded on some consistently dubious visual effects. They get the job done, one supposes, since Emmerich really is about putting as much business—artillery fire, planes diving, assorted balls of flame—as possible into the frame. At a certain point, one has to either accept the effects as part of the movie's shiny aesthetic or dismiss the whole thing outright.

There's enough here that the second option would be unfair. For all of its notable and undeniable faults, Midway does set out to explain the backdrop of battle of the title, and in a broad sense, it does achieve that. The unfortunate part is how the rest of the screenplay and the director get in the way of that goal.

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