Midway: Film Review

Midway: Film Review

Cast: Ed Skrein, Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson, Aaron Eckhart, Dennis Quaid, Mandy Moore, Nick Jonas, Luke Evans
Director: Roland Emmerich

One-note, thin characters and some dialogue that's purely about gung-ho jingoism rather than deep insight, B-movie Midway is exactly the kind of film you'd expect from disaster movie director Roland Emmerich.

Based on a true story and a sequel of sorts to Pearl Harbour, Midway is the story of what happened next as the Americans scrambled to prevent another attack from the Japanese after December 7, 1941.

In the wake of the attack, a group of fly-boys, led by Ed Skrein's Dick Best scramble to take to the skies, while Patrick Wilson's intelligence team tries to work out where the next attack could come from.

Midway has potential - Emmerich certainly knows how to effectively present disaster on screen, with his Pearl Harbour attack channeling some of his Independence Day roots with ease.

But the script sends the Japanese to one-note villains, dressed in black and huddling to contemplate their next move (it's alarming the Chinese have backed this film so heavily) and it elevates the Americans to do gooders with whiter-than-white intentions. It could be hagiography, if it were deeper and more insightful in its character realisation.

However, as it stands, what Midway becomes after an interesting opening, is simply a series of attack scenes, which jump around the different viewpoints from within the American world. Much like levels of a video game, Midway doesn't have time to go deeper than the surface to get to its action.

CGI and jeopardy mix hand in hand, and granted Midway never aspires to be more than a computer-generated spectacle. Yet, with Wilson's stoic work, a practically wasted Eckhart, and Harrelson in a wig, the film wastes its best assets on the exploits of the gum-chewing, chiselled jaw jutting, rule-floutin' Dick Best, who's embodied by Ed Skrein with all the delicacy of a paper cut out; there's no nuance in this real life flyboy, merely a hollow shell filled with the script cliches, and brimming with nothing else.

All in all, while Midway delivers on its spectacle early on, it soon becomes clear that the bombast and bombing raids are all it has - narratives are dropped and ignored, only to be resolved right at the end, robbing the film of an emotional edge, and a human element to cheer for in one of America's darkest days.