NAVAL GAZING
Action director turns to Second World War to deliver some thrilling popcorn fare
If you’d like to see a big-screen dramatization of the 1942 Doolittle Raid, you could check out Spencer Tracy in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, released just two years after the fact. Curious about the Battle of the Coral Sea? There’s Cliff Robertson in the film of the same name from 1959. And for Pearl Harbor, if you don’t like Michael Bay’s version there are many others, including the excellent Tora! Tora! Tora! from 1970.
But if you’d like to get all your Second World War Pacific naval history in one place, pay a visit to Roland Emmerich’s Midway. He’ll throw in the Marshalls-Gilberts raids of February 1942, for free!
Emmerich is justly famous for his end-of-the-world spectacles, including Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC and 2012 — honestly, you could construct an entire calendar from his output. But he sometimes dabbles in history, as
with The Patriot (American Revolution), Stonewall (Stonewall Riots) and Anonymous, which asks: Just who was this Shakespeare person anyway?
Midway opens in 1937 with Admiral Yamamoto warning U.S. military attaché Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson) that nobody puts Japan in a corner, or words to that effect. Cut to Dec. 7, 1941, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that “awakened a sleeping giant,” as Yamamoto may or may not have said. (In the movie, he tosses the famous line to his wife.)
From there — the film is more than two and a quarter hours, so settle in — Emmerich follows a number of U.S. flyboys with varying degrees of bravery and craziness as they arm up and engage the enemy.
The film doesn’t give equal time to the Japanese — you’ll need Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from
Iwo Jima for that — but it does present them as more than just faceless villains. Like the Americans, most of them are fighting a war they didn’t ask for.
Wilson’s character pops up from time to time with useful information gathered by the military’s new signal intelligence unit. In a wonderful detail lifted from history, many of the code-breakers are military band members, reassigned to this more valuable work in the hopes that their sense of rhythm and timing will help them decode captured communiqués. Hey, it beats playing Reveille.
The cast includes flying aces and famous faces. Woody Harrelson plays Admiral Nimitz; Dennis Quaid is Vice Admiral (Bull) Halsey; and Aaron Eckhart is Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, shot down over occupied China during the raid that bears his name.
Probably the most screen time goes to Ed Skrein as Dick Best. Mandy Moore plays his wife, though Second World War films are notoriously thin on female character development, and Midway is no exception. Dick’s buddy Wade McClusky is played by Luke Evans, and there’s also Bruno Gaido (Nick Jonas), who in one memorable (and factual!) scene shoots down a Japanese bomber from a parked plane on the deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. The crashing bomber is so close it slices through his own plane’s tail on its way down.
With all the running (and flying) around, the namesake battle isn’t even joined until some 90 minutes into the movie, but the run-up is seldom boring. Emmerich knows how to wring tension from combat scenes, whether with a torpedo that fails to explode or a near miss in a bombing run. The carnage is visceral without being too bloody, resulting in a PG rating.
And sure, we know where all of this is headed, but the filmmaker finds time to add some intriguing historical footnotes, like the presence on Midway of director John Ford, shot at by approaching Japanese aircraft and shooting back with nothing more than a movie camera. The resulting footage went into The Battle of Midway, which won the inaugural Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1942.
Emmerich’s Midway may not have the same lofty aspirations, but it provides thrilling popcorn fare nonetheless. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm