It occurs to me that Charlton Heston endangering his career to facilitate his son’s interracial relationship with a Japanese woman is pretty
Progressive? Virtue signally? Hamfisted ? “What the hell does this have to do with Midwayey”?..basically the kind of thing that would spawn a lot of YT videos today
For its time. I wonder if people rolled their eyes and bitched back then. I was around and saw the movie but didn’t go out of my way to read reviews.
Why can’t Hollywood make a historical movie that is historically accurate? I don’t mean the number of rivets in the plane canopy has to be correct, but how about just getting basic facts correct? Why must everything be changed?
Look at the inaccuracies in Dunkirk and Bohemian Rhapsody for two examples. Things are changed that are 1) easily checked, 2) obviously wrong but 3) don’t really make the story better by being changed. It’s like Hollywood writers or directors feel the MUST change things or the movie isn’t “theirs” or something. I wish I knew what they were thinking. The original story is already interesting! Why do they think it has to be changed? Ego?
Of course this is obviously wrong. It is entirely possible to make a movie based on real events that gets the details right and still utterly sucks. If it’s poorly paced, dull, badly edited and acted, it’s gonna suck ass no matter if it’s all true or not.
Similarly, a movie can play loose with some facts but still deliver a quality experience. “Apollo 13” alters some little things - they argument between Haise and Swigert never happened - but it’s a fantastic movie that tells you a pretty solid version of the story.
I haven’t seen the film but the trailer is not promising, and I didn’t bother to note any historical errors; it looks like it’'s going to suck because the acting and dialogue I saw was AMAZINGLY bad. Like, middle school Christmas play bad.
Those are totally different examples.
“Dunkirk” wasn’t presented as the story of real people. It was just a general version of events. The parts of the story it got right were the parts it needed to get right to convey an idea of what happened and what it meant. It was a great movie.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” was quite specifically about real people, and some of the things it changed - especially about Freddie Mercury’s sexuality and his having AIDS - were, frankly, kind of offensive.
I just saw this and the most grievous error is all the American planes being shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire instead of by the fighters flying cover over the Japanese carriers. In reality only 2 or 3 of the American attackers were downed by ship-borne guns. CGI flack must be cheaper to create than CGI Zeroes.
I enjoyed this post all the more by reading it in your voice. 
Also no Wildcats in the film. I know the bomber aircraft went in without waiting for their escorts but there still should have been Wildcats somewhere in the battle.
I think that’s because the only Wildcats to engage over the Japanese carriers were from Yorktown and the film pretty much ignores the existence of that ship. “Hey look! Yorktown got hit!” is pretty much all you hear about the American flagship during the whole movie.
Zewoes?
Also, those fighters (which were actually from Saratoga’s VF3) were swarmed by Zeros and had their hands full. Fortunately they were commanded by John Thatch, who had developed the “Thatch weave” shortly before (this was the first time it was used in combat). While it allowed four of the six Wildcats to survive, they were unable to assist the bombers.
I love CGI, Norm Macdonald looks young enough to be a pilot!
While this movie looks like shit, I find the general idea of a Midway movie fascinating. The 1970s “Midway” wasn’t very good either.
The Battle of Midway is one of the most fascinating historical events of all time to me, partially because I was once in signals intelligence, and sigint played a huge role in Midway. It’s a remarkable example of a battle being a near-180-degree turning point in a huge, huge war. It’s a rare historical example of an elaborate plan being foiled by an adversary laying a clever trap. The result of the battle was, in part, due to strokes of luck. It was the final and utterly conclusive proof of the supremacy of aircraft over battleships. The stakes were huge; had the American force been destroyed instead of the Japanese, something that absolutely could have happened with just a few tweaks in what happened, it would have been catastrophic for the American position in the Pacific. It’s just a hell of a story.
Telling it in a two hour movie, though… I don’t know how I would write that screenplay. Understanding Midway requires insight into the thought processes of both American and Japanese over the course of six months, if not more; the importance of the battle is informed by everything in the Pacific that led up to that, especially Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle raid, and Coral Sea. You can’t explain WHY the Japanese made a play for Midway without understanding the Coral Sea.
We saw it. Very decent acting, except by Harellson. The CGI wasnt bad. Altho yes, RickJay’s point that the battle may not be fully understood without Pearl and Coral sea, I think Doolittles raid took too much screen time.
Too damn much smoking, and yes I know they smoked a lot back then.
Overall, not bad but I wont be watching it again.
I saw it with my GF last night and three quarters of the way in she asked me why where the Japanese attacking Midway, it’s not explained in the movie to any extent other than Yamamoto has a plan something-something; so for someone not familiar with the history the movie fails in that regard. Maybe they should had spent less time on Halsey’s rash and more on that.
Overall it was rather bad, I should say, the pandering to the Chinese market in particular, specially considering the still present bellicose attitude of China against Japan. Once you are aware of the situation explained in this video, you can’t listen to something like the dialogue between Doolittle and the Chinese character without getting an unpleasant whiff of propaganda and fully explains that superfluous story detour.
The acting wasn’t good overall, the effects neither and the action sequences didn’t require my disbelief being suspended, it demanded it to be cryogenically stored into a time capsule for future generations, what with the Dauntless acrobatics, ship battle group formations not fit for even a game of Battleship, Zero’s machine gun fire against battleships having the effect of HE rockets, a submarine at periscope depth with a destroyer literally on top of it and the SPOILER I suppose:
The climax scene, with Best dive bomb turning into a glide bomb run down the deck of the battleship that would have sent the bomb flying off the bow of the ship. No movie, that’s not how physics work, and if it did Best would had been blown to smithereens by dropping the bomb 20 feet of the deck. :rolleyes:
Charlton Heston…the Sean Bean of the 70’s.