Maybe its time to recognise the new technologies and make it a Choose-your-own-Adventure, fully-immersive VR movie. Choose which side, which plane or ship and Be There!
Midway had a lot of Roland Emmerich’s trademark shitting on the laws of physics through the use of CGI.
I prefer the more subdued and grounded style of Dunkirk.
I don’t think you clicked LL’s link. The version of Pearl Harbor linked by LL is extremely accurate and detailed.
You make excellent points. How do you engage the audience without resorting to artificial sensationalism? You use Breaking Bad techniques with Downton Abbey detail.
I’d start with the death of **Billy Mitchell** in 1936 and flash back to the sinking of G102, Frankfurt and Ostfriesland. With the emphasis on the first two. I’d make the tension between services a subplot and emphasize what a meticulous cooperative effort it was. They used SE5s to suppress anti aircraft fire from the ships ahead of the arrival of bombers. Then stopped and evaluated the effectiveness of each raid. You have a Russian advisor, SE5s bombing and strafing, followed by Handley-Page and Martin bombers. Lot’s of good CGI material. Then there’s the joint report and it’s suppression and subsequent leakage to the press. But, the arguments are all rational. Not lackeys getting even with Mitchell. It’s the kind of intrigue and court room drama that sells these days.
Mitchell is subsequently sent to the far east to study the situation. He writes reports and a book (Winged Defense available for $35 on Alibris). Mitchells conclusion is that aircraft carriers are not practical. That Japan is a likely foe that will attack Hawaii using island based bombers.
That’s the opener. From there I’d move on to the Navy conducting mock carrier attacks on Hawaii using USS Lexington.
I’d have a hard time seeing anyone improve on Tora!Tora!Tora!. If they could leave out the romance and use a light touch or CGI it might be worth a shot, but modern directors aren’t likely to oblige.
That or something like The Winds of War (first a novel, then a miniseries), which devoted most of its political intrigue to the situation in Europe (helped along by having a main character serve as a naval attaché in Berlin, and an in-law with family in Poland), except in this case with more of an emphasis on Japan (which was covered I think only from the limited perspective of fleet sailors in Hawaii).
ETA: FWIW, I don’t think we need anymore WWII-era movies. IMHO, it’s time to move on and tell new stories, or at the very least–if we must keep retreading the past–stories told from new and relevant (to today) perspectives.
As Dunkirk showed, there are still good films to be made from World War 2 history. But not ones that focus on “Army Navy contention for coastal defense”.
See, now Dunkirk was a fine film, but to me is very much representative of the sort of film I think we can do just as well without. It just rehashes the same old mythology.
So, I guess it’s a good example of how even a well-made film that focuses on the dramatic elements (and that I certainly did enjoy watching) is something I could do without if the same old subject getting trotted out again is WWII. It’s why I am so confident that, even though the circa-2000 Pearl Harbor film was trash, and Tora! Tora! Tora! is a bit of a snooze fest (albeit not as much of one as a film focusing on “Army Navy contention for coastal defense” is liable to be, I’ll grant you), the fact that the “definitive” version has not yet been produced (actually, I would argue that, for all it’s faults, Tora! Tora! Tora! probably is that: the definitive telling), we don’t need another attempt at perfection.
You can’t perfect a subject that’s gone stale.
I’m sure there are directors who would love to make the kind of movie you’re thinking of here, but it’s not directors but producers and financiers that are the real issue.
A WWII-vintage film is going to cost some real money, even if a lot of it goes to CGI. To get that kind of money, you’re going to want a return on your investment, or at least not a total loss - which means you need a convincing story about why this screenplay that you’d like to film is a “four quadrant” movie.
So you can kinda see this happen with Midway (2019). The male quadrants are covered by bombs, explosions, etc. but you need something for the female quadrants. Mandy Moore as the love interest/wife of Dick Best hits you the GenX/Millennial part of the older female quadrant. Naturally, she needs a subplot in and among all the explosions. For the female under-25 quadrant, we’ll need a younger guy popular with the Zoomers. Harry Styles is busy on Dunkirk, and Timothée Chalamet probably doesn’t want to bulk up for the role, so we’ll cast Nick Jonas as Bruno Gaido. Boom, there you go - it could be the next Titanic!
Also, $24 million from Chinese investors helped the movie get produced. I’m guessing the Doolittle Raid subplot was written in an effort to help bring that money in, and to pique the interest of the Chinese market.
I’m as interested in Pearl Harbor as about anyone I’ve interacted with, and while I would love to see six or seven seasons in-depth coverage, it would bore the hell out of most everyone.
The problem with the list in the OP is that the background knowledge required to appreciate topics such as “Army Navy contention for coastal defense” is just far beyond what the average person can tolerate.
Certainly, compelling stories can be written and filmed about anything, even such monotonous events as paint drying. You could have CG showing the molecular level responses, I suppose, but there has to be some sort of human element for most people to engage.
Certainly, the evolution of strategy in the interwar period and the conflicts between old rivals in the face of new technologies is fascinating, but some sort of drama would need to be created to keep most people from switching channels.
The stuff you’re describing is pre-battle planning and post-battle investigations. These are not topics that most people find as compelling as depictions of the battle itself.
And most of the people who are interested in these kinds of background topics are going to prefer to read books about them rather than watch it on TV.
From Here to Eternity humanized the story, but only from the perspective of white mainlanders. Tora Tora Tora shared the story with the Japanese, somewhat, and 1976’s Midway gave a secondary character a peripheral Japanese-American girlfriend who hadn’t even been given a 1941 hairstyle.
Oahu is about the same area as Cook County Illinois. If the Japanese had bombed the Miracle Mile, you’d expect a movie about it would include some people who lived in Chicago.
If you were going to dramatize the interwar period and events leading up to Pearl Harbor, your best bet would be a focus on Imperial Japan.
You’ve got the pathos of knowing how the war is going to end and that the Japanese knew it would likely end only in defeat.
You’ve got rivalry. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) flat out hated each other. I remember hearing a joke from a retired US Army colonel that the Soviet Union was the opponent, the enemy was the Navy and Air Force. In Japan, this attitude was not a tongue-in-cheek remark. It seemed a religiously held belief.
You’ve got intrigue, the mid-level officers of the IJN and IJA were a rambunctious bunch. Insubordination and assasination were the order of the day. One of the reasons Adm Isoroku Yamamoto was given command of Combined Fleet was to get him out of the Imperial Headquarters where it was feared he would be assasinated for his oppostion to the Tripartite Pact.
You’ve got action and adventure. The war in China was kicked off by a couple of IJA colonels who thought the invasion of Manchuria was a good idea, so they created an incident (possibly with the tacit support of Tokyo) to give them an excuse to invade, thus kicking off the war in China.
There’s the outline, now it is just a matter of casting. If we can get Dwayne Johnson or one of the Chris’s (Pratt, Pine, or Hemsworth), we got the makings of a hit.
With Eleanor Roosevelt delivering withering comments from the sidelines?
How about William Friedman and the breaking of PURPLE?
The best book on that is Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy.
At least he was a gambler and womanizer so there could be a number of plot twists. Much more colorful than other leaders and has the benefit of name recognition, unlike, for example (warning, obscure name alert, just to look smart) Tanaka Shin’ichi, Chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Division, “driven by a hostile worldview that made him the doomsday oracle of the Army General Staff. His division was the most aggressive.”
The problem is that there are too many stories and too many characters. Just like all foreigners tend to look alike to the Japanese, the Japanese military officers would be hard to differentiate for Western audiences.
OTOH, maybe it would be nice to knock down some of the myths surrounding Yamamoto.
Maybe it is more realistic to consider the individual events that are worth telling/retelling.
Yamamoto would be interesting, so too an accurate portrayal of Mitchell. I also believe the whole story of the Saratoga and Lexington attack simulations is worthwhile.
So what we have is a couple of suggestions for movies that would cost hundreds of millions to make, and that would appeal to a half-dozen old geeks on an obscure internet message board. I’m sure the investors will be lining up! /s
The problem is what everybody is suggesting are incidents, not stories. Those that are stories are too isolated and uninteresting to the Common Filmwatcher.
IMO a better story (using Dwayne or a Chris or two) would be to tell the story of those people who, rather than surrender at Corregidor, went inland and formed a Philippine Resistance. The rest of the war could serve as background.
Excellent suggestion.
I believe a quality treatment of history would compete very well with the repetitive whodunnits that are currently streaming.