Midway

Perhaps the studio logos should have clued me in on what I was in for.  When we see the Lionsgate logo play out on the screen, it's portrayed in black and white.  This is obviously to try to make it look like it's from 1940s film stock, but it doesn't look right.  It's still full of slick and polished CG animation, so just showing it in black and white does not create the intended illusion.  Maybe they could have tried to make a simpler logo in the style that studios were using back in the day.

The movie Midway is less a history lesson, and more a CG-infused spectacle.  Whenever we see the swooping planes, massive aircraft carriers and subs, we're reminded that we are looking at a special effect.  Everything is digital and has been scrubbed clean, including the violence, which leads to some oddly bloodless battle scenes. (The only moment we witness the true tragedy of war in the film is when we see a charred body.) The film was directed by Roland Emmerich, who is no stranger to films filled with special effects and lots of explosions. (He made 1996's Independence Day.) He fills the screen with so much CG and pyrotechnics that it starts to resemble a demo reel for a special effects studio.  He obviously wants his audience to feel like they're in the heat of battle, but I constantly was being reminded that I was looking at optical effects.

Lost among all the explosions and technical wizardry is the undercooked screenplay by Wes Tooke, which never manages to grab our attention with any compelling characters.  Most of the figures portrayed in the film are taken from real life, and they are portrayed by veteran actors like Dennis Quaid, Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson and Aaron Eckhart.  We also get some fairly fresh new faces to play the cocky young pilots like Ed Skrein and Nick Jonas.  However, neither the old or the new faces are able to give us much of anything from their performances, because the script constantly keeps us at a distance, and never develops them beyond some basic character traits. (We have the hotshot, the kid who's scared, the wife who sits at home with a daughter fretting over the fate of her husband, and the stoic command figure.) They're basically all playing military movie cliches here, only without the added personality and life that we expect.

Almost as if it knows this, Midway bombards us with as much noise and spectacle as it possibly can.  There is definitely some artistry to how the battle of Pearl Harbor is recreated, as it's the most tense scene in the film.  But as the movie goes on, all the gunfire, explosions, and diving planes kind of merge into one giant mass of images.  The movie does try to look at the war from both sides, as it will often cut to the Japanese military and their strategic planning.  However, this ends up not working in the film's favor, as the Japanese are just as distant as the Americans.  We never get a true sense of relationship between the men, and they talk in cliches as well.  This is one of those cases where I admire what the filmmakers were trying to do, but they come up short.

Basically, each and every actor who turns up on screen gets dwarfed and drowned out by the spectacle going on around them.  Emmerich doesn't quite get the grasp of mixing the human drama with the effects, and so the movie becomes terribly one-sided.  None of the characters get to develop much of a personality, and while the movie does try to show us some of the behind the scenes strategizing, it never comes across as interesting as it should.  Besides, a lot of the strategy sequences basically boil down to real life strategist Ed Layton (portrayed in the film by Patrick Wilson) being right all the time, and everyone eventually learning to listen to him.  The movie just never conveys the sense of urgency that it should.

Midway does make a noble effort, but it gets lost in a sea of a mediocre screenplay and an out of control budget.  At the very least, it sticks to the story at hand and doesn't try to distract us with an unconvincing love story like Michael Bay did with 2001's Pearl Harbor.  But as the repetitive battles went on, my focus was not on the brave men being represented up on the screen, but on all the technical work.  Somehow, I don't think that was the intention. 

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