By Preston Wilder
It’s a good week for remakes of 70s movies, though I don’t know if a new reconstruction of the same historical event (the Battle of Midway in WWII) really counts as a remake. I haven’t seen the 1976 Midway – despite an all-star cast led by Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda and Robert Mitchum – but I suspect it was much the same as this new version, directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day fame: troop deployments, top brass talking strategy, a judicious number of big explosions, plus a tapestry of mildly interesting ‘real-life’ people, tailor-made for a well-known face to make a brief impression before we move on to the next one.
You couldn’t exactly call this an all-star cast, but still: here’s Ed Skrein as Dick Best, the gum-chewing daredevil pilot instructed – in vain – to “knock off this cowboy bullshit”. Here’s a growly Dennis Quaid as Admiral Halsey, gruffly commending a soldier for shooting down a Japanese kamikaze before he can immolate himself on their aircraft carrier, calling it “the bravest thing I’ve seen in my life”. (Some might say the kamikaze pilot was braver; but let’s not go there.) Here’s the soldier in question, telling the tale of his grandpa who worked construction on the Empire State Building then got killed in a freak road accident, the moral being that you never know what’ll get you (so don’t worry about it). Here’s Hollywood director John Ford, who did indeed turn up with a cameraman and make a 17-minute film called The Battle of Midway, back in ’42. Here’s Aaron Eckhart as Col. James Doolittle, who bombed Tokyo then escaped through occupied China – an irrelevant sub-plot, clearly added at the behest of the film’s Chinese co-producers.
None of these people are more than sketches, which is fine; the point is the history lesson, the battle itself. Alas, despite the emphasis on tactics, the script doesn’t set things out very lucidly; the dramatic arc – even the geography of the battle – isn’t really there (it’s all on Wikipedia, of course; but it shouldn’t be our job to check Wikipedia). It doesn’t help that Midway – which took place in June 1942 and “turned the tide” of the war in the Pacific, as an opening caption spoiler-ishly puts it – seems to have been a series of skirmishes more than a single battle, nor that it was fought at a slight remove, with torpedoes and dive bombers. Long before the end, you may start losing sight of the bigger picture, seeing only individual incidents and acts of courage by these brave men; I nearly said ‘brave men and women’, but in fact – though the film makes an effort – the women are mostly stuck with lines like “I’ll fix you a sandwich”. That’s okay, it’s a war movie.
What do we expect from a war movie? That’s an interesting question. If the answer is ‘To discourage people from going to war’, Midway probably fails the test. Almost the first thing we hear is FDR declaring “War is a contagion” – but in truth, it doesn’t seem so terrible. A few minor characters die, to be sure (mostly at Pearl Harbour and mostly to inspire Dick Best and Co., war being apparently more virtuous when it’s motivated by revenge), but most of our heroes come through, and even seem enriched by the experience. If, on the other hand, the answer is ‘To show soldiers making tough decisions under pressure’, the film delivers. There’s a good deal of heat-of-battle angst. Fear must be overcome, guilt put aside; Emmerich is also interested in what it means to be a leader (a film director being much like a general), though not in any complex way. He was notably cynical about the exercise of power in The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (the latter being a film where the one-percenters build an ark to escape the end of the world, leaving the little people to their fate), but the leaders are all pretty honourable here. Midway is a lot more simplistic.
This is indeed a simplistic movie, its main pleasure being the visceral one of dive bombers swooping low, dodging shrapnel, to release their bombs – a kind of vertiginous pilot-cam that never gets old. It’s not boring (though it could’ve been shorter), just a little plastic; it skates on the surface. Some might call it a tribute to those who fought in the war – but is making war look like a not-too-imaginative video game really such a tribute? Basically, this is a film where a daredevil pilot sets out the reasons why a certain reckless action shouldn’t be taken –then takes it anyway: “Ah, the hell with it. Follow me, boys!”. This is no way to run a massacre.
MIDWAY **
DIRECTED BY Roland Emmerich
STARRING Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson
US 2019 138 mins.
