Midway

December 7th. 1941. Hawaii. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbo(u)r and decimate the US naval fleet. Intelligence Officer Edwin T. Layton (Patrick Wilson) warned this would happen but no one listened and now the United States is no longer a neutral country in World War 2. It's time to strike back. Tokyo is bombed and Japan are angered. In retaliation they take control of the Coral Sea in an attempt to cut off US access to Australia and the Philippines. They also plan to assume control of the Midway Islands. With a base there they'd be in striking distance of the US west coast. Layton figures this out and the US strikes first, led in the skies by the fierce Richard Best (Ed Skrein).

Ed Skrein, the lead of Midway is an English actor with an American accent so bad it would hurt your teeth. His character's name is Dick Best, making him sound more like an egotistical porn star than a heroic pilot. Aaron Eckhart appears and then vanishes like a fart in the wind. There's CGI here so unfinished that it stands out a mile. You know who's going to die the moment they appear onscreen and talk about their wife or how it's their last day before they go home. The film is full of Chekov's gun moments that you know will be revisited later in the film. Even for a true story it's painfully predictable in places and well... there's a million and one things you could laugh at during this.

And yet I kinda liked it. It's has an old fashioned feel about it that you rarely get anymore in War movies. There's no attempt to make things gritty, there's no graphic violence and very little profanity, none of the usual postmodern touches you'd expect in a new war film, even one based in the past. It's dogfights are exciting and easy to follow (a rarity in these days of shakycam). There's a fun cameo from one John Ford. It's sincere in it's depiction of men at work on both sides of the battle and best of all it spends time with the enemy as well. We get to see how they tick, how they act under pressure. It's a rare war film that depicts adversaries as anything other than faceless avatars and it felt surprising and refreshing to see it in an American production.

But because it's an American production it's chock full of the usual cliches you'd expect to see. The aforementioned predictable deaths, ultra near misses and gung-ho bravado are all ladled on thick. It's a Summer blockbuster dumped in a November release slot with very little advertising which suggests a lack of confidence on the behalf of distributors. It's odd because far worse films have gotten bigger releases this year. It's a passion project from director Roland Emmerich, a film he's been trying to get off the ground for years. Best known for his big 90's and early 00's disaster films he's a king of bombast but here he keeps the outrageous action to a minimum. Most of what we see is kept within the realms of possibility out of respect to a true story and maybe that's what's making people & makers wary; that this might be more of a history lesson than a piece of entertainment. It was both for me btw, the Pacific theatre is something i knew very little about.

A game cast do well. Mostly. Skrein, once you can get past the accent fits the hero mold well. Wilson is solid as always in a part that honestly requires very little of him and old pro's like Dennis Quaid, Woody Harrelson, Mark Rolston and Jake Weber keep things grounded. Which is good because the younger supporting cast of lesser known faces basically blend into one. On the Japanese side Tadanobu Asano (best known over here as Kakihara from Ichi The Killer) stands out as Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, a man of true honor, one who doesn't make the mistake of underestimating his enemy. I wish we'd got to spend more time with him and less with the amorphous blob. Mandy Moore as the main face of the wives at home unsurprisingly gets short shrift. The women in these stories always do, in roles consisting of tears and anguished faces.

Midway is better than it looks in the trailers but don't go to this expecting depth or subtlely or anything beyond broad characterisation. What there is is dogfights and aerial acrobatics, old fashioned heroics and a history lesson about a part of war rarely mentioned over here. In cinemas now.