It's not a good movie. While being historically accurate, the problem of "Midway" is that it doesn't depict the battle in apprehensible way. So you watch some airplanes fly, so you see the flack, so you look at some not great SGI aircraft carriers and listen to a story of how USA has trapped the japs. Then you see more airplanes fly, and further more airplanes fly, and even more airplanes, but what exactly has been happening is never explained. In fact I watched the movie, understood nothing, then I watched 20 minutes documentary on YouTube that explained everything that happened in the battle of Midway very thoroughly and then I said, "oooh yeah, oh that was really what was going on, ooh these airplanes were the first squadron, and those where the second squadron, etc. and now it makes sense, oh yeah. Now I see the movie is true to the story". But that is exactly the problem. Why would I need to see 3 hour long movie which doesn't tell what exactly happened if I could easily be more entertained and informed if I saw a documentary movie. Really, on youTube they have great videos, depicting the Midway battle, with maps, detailed explanations and animations that are far more interesting than this... thing.

Barely above mediocrity, that's what it is. I had higher hopes for this movie.

Let's start with what I think is the most important thing in a movie like this: the story. As far as I know, they got most of the stuff right and that really pleased me. I'm not a huge history buff, but Midway has long been an interesting battle for me. What puzzled me is the way they decided to tell the story. Did we really need to see the attack on Pearl Harbor? Everybody knows how the Pacific War started, it could have (and should have, in my opinion) been simply mentioned in a couple of lines of dialogue. Same for the Doolittle raid; while interesting in and of itself, it had literally nothing to do with the titular naval battle. I guess the Shangai studio involved needed to show the good chinese versus the evil japanese.
For crying out loud, it takes 75 minutes of runtime before the start of Midway! I'm not saying I wanted to jump straight in, as a bit of introduction is needed, especially for the lesser known aspects like the intelligence gathering. But it was so drawn out. And to make it worse, when it came to the actual battle, they rushed over some things, like Yorktown surviving two attacks and actually baiting the japanese forces.
I don't know what to say about Best's horizontal bombing, that's just a travesty. I understand needing to embellish stuff for a movie, but dive bombing through a cloud of anti-air is already pretty cool, without ruining it with a super cheesy line.
I'm just glad they didn't push too much with some love story or anything like that.

The visuals were ok. Some scenes looked very good, others not so much. There was definitely inconsistency in the CGI quality, I guess the budget was limited. One thing that bugged me was the planes; they looked great, but they didn't feel real. Almost like they were "slow".

As for the cast, I enjoyed Harrelson and Wilson's performances, nothing special but solid acting. The others were very forgettable.

In the end, it's an ok movie, but hard to recommend.

6/10

This movie was a bit of a positive surprise. I was actually prepared to not like it that much but Hollywood actually made a decent war movie without pushing their usual left wing political propaganda and woke SJW bullshit.

It’s really a good movie in pretty much all aspects.

First, I liked that it covers quite a bit more than “just” Midway. It actually starts before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then it covers the attack on Perl Harbor and also the famous Dolittle raid on Tokay to finally end up with the battle of Midway. All of it is more or less historically accurate. We also get to see a fair amount of the history from the viewpoint of the Japanese. Whether that bit of the story is actually entirely accurate I guess no one will ever know of course.

I also liked that they took the effort to get all Japanese actors (or Japanese looking at least) playing the Japanese side and that they spoke Japanese all the time. That’s the kind of thing that gives the right atmosphere for those parts of the movie.

The acting was overall good on both sides. I quite liked Woody Harrelson as Nimitz. Ed Skrein was probably the actor I felt made the most mediocre performance but that might just be me.

Of course there can be no war movie without things going boom and this movie didn’t disappoint on that. It has plenty of action, lots of flight scenes and lots of thing being blown up and it was overall well made. The effects when large ships got torpedoed, bombed or when their munitions exploded was quite realistic. You could see the ships shuddering and the effect on the water around it.

If I should complain about something it was that the movie is too short. Given the large time period it covers there is so much material that it could easily have been longer. It almost felt a bit rushed. There could have been much more suspense around the battle of Midway itself and the part of how they got Yorktown operational, and hid the fact from the Japanese, in time for the battle was altogether left out for example.

The movie was 2 hours 18 minutes long which is respectable but not that long by today’s standards. All three of the extended Lord of the Rings movies was three and a half hours long and this one could easily have been as long.

Surprisingly balanced viewpoint for Emmerich, but it can't save the film from being very bland and even the many battle scenes didn't do a lot for me. They are usually kind of cool to look at, but so reliant on unconvincing CGI that you can almost never be fooled that what you seen onscreen is real. Especially in the beginning the greenscreen scenes are very bad and distracting. And while even in a film like this unconvincing VFX are not a dealbreaker, they just add to:

- lackluster performances from the actors
- hardly any sense for pacing and bad editing
- predictable story beats (beyond the fact that obviously this is based on a true story, you can often easily predict which planes get shot down in which order just based on how they set it up and what the laziest path is from there)
- boring and flat characters and
- at times laughable dialogue.

And even the battle scenes kind of get old and repetitive over time, so in the end you're not left with much to remember. It's not terrible, but it's not good by any means either.

All this unfortunately means that "meh" is the most favorable rating I can give this one. You're not going to have a great time with your brain turned on, but on the other hand there's not enough there to entertain you with your brain turned off either.

War stories are only worth retelling in film if you're doing something new and interesting with the genre. Otherwise, it's just a retread of 'Pearl Harbour' or 'Fury' or any of the dozen other thematically-empty, explosion-happy extravaganzas from the last ten years. There's a compelling, nuanced, and affecting film to be made about Midway. This is not that film.
- Jake Watt

Read Jake's full article...
https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-midway-sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing