Mid­way

With the excep­tion of Michael Bay, no film­mak­er work­ing today seems to take as much sat­is­fac­tion out of blow­ing things up as Roland Emmerich. Since leav­ing his native Ger­many for Hol­ly­wood in the ear­ly ​’90s, the mas­ter of dis­as­ter has laid siege to some of the world’s most famous land­marks, and in invari­ably spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion. He’s bat­tered the Burj Khal­i­fa, oblit­er­at­ed the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty and Christ the Redeemer, reduced the Vat­i­can to a pile of smok­ing rub­ble and wrecked the White House on three sep­a­rate occasions.

But whether the basic premise of a Roland Emmerich film is alien inva­sion, eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phe, dooms­day prophe­cy or the attempt­ed assas­si­na­tion of a pres­i­dent, there is always a clear method to the may­hem – even when his inten­tion is sim­ply to give the audi­ence a cheap thrill. Still, giv­en his pen­chant for showy, seat-shak­ing action, it’s hard not to greet the prospect of Emmerich tack­ling one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and strate­gic bat­tles of World War Two, which result­ed in thou­sands of casu­al­ties, with a degree of apprehension.

True to form, Mid­way is an effects-dri­ven epic that deliv­ers explo­sive set-pieces with fero­cious fre­quen­cy. Yet it is also a remark­ably even-hand­ed piece of film­mak­ing, always striv­ing to be some­thing more than big, dumb and full of gun while hew­ing much clos­er to his­tor­i­cal truth than might be expect­ed. It depicts one of America’s worst mil­i­tary loss­es and sub­se­quent­ly one of its great­est vic­to­ries from a strik­ing­ly human­ist per­spec­tive – and from both sides. It wouldn’t be at all sur­pris­ing to learn that Emmerich, in prepa­ra­tion for this film, had watched Bay’s Pearl Har­bor and made notes on how not to drop a bomb.

In recount­ing the six-month skir­mish that occurred fol­low­ing the Japan­ese ambush of the Amer­i­can naval base on 7 Decem­ber, 1941, Emmerich has enlist­ed some seri­ous act­ing mus­cle in the shape of Woody Har­rel­son, Den­nis Quaid, Patrick Wil­son, Luke Evans and Aaron Eck­hart, who fea­ture as var­i­ous crew mem­bers and com­man­ders of the fleet of US bat­tle­ships that turned the tide of the Pacif­ic War in the Allies’ favour. If movies were judged on the col­lec­tive jaw­line strength of their cast, this one would go down as an all-time classic.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, much of Midway’s run­time is spent in the com­pa­ny of British actor Ed Skrein, who often plays nasty, thug­gish char­ac­ters but here stars as an almost car­toon­ish­ly hero­ic fly­ing ace named Dick Best. He fails to con­vince in the role, giv­ing off a sus­pi­cious­ly vil­lain­ous vibe even when he’s reel­ing off patri­ot­ic sound­bites dur­ing the mid­dle of a dog­fight. Wes Tooke’s pro­sa­ic script cer­tain­ly doesn’t help, but when Nick Jonas is con­sis­tent­ly act­ing your lead­ing man off the screen you know you’ve got a problem.

Skrein’s short­com­ings aside, Emmerich man­ages his A‑list ensem­ble well, even as the prin­ci­pal cast becomes increas­ing­ly dis­persed as the bat­tle inten­si­fies (for exam­ple, while Wilson’s intel­li­gence offi­cer frets over tac­ti­cal maps and inter­cept­ed cod­ed mes­sages far away from the action, Eckhart’s Lieu­tenant Colonel is shot down over a remote Chi­nese vil­lage). But the suc­cess of Mid­way ulti­mate­ly rests with the director’s deci­sion to pro­vide a more bal­anced ver­sion of events.

This sto­ry has been told before, notably in 1976 with Charl­ton Hes­ton and Hen­ry Fon­da, and in 1942 via John Ford’s pro­pa­gan­da doc­u­men­tary, which con­tains actu­al footage of the bat­tle (and is essen­tial view­ing). His­tor­i­cal­ly, Hol­ly­wood has tend­ed to obscure the enemy’s per­spec­tive, and not always with good rea­son. Emmerich’s Mid­way doesn’t ful­ly resist the explic­it­ly pro-Amer­i­can, pro-mil­i­tary agen­da of its pre­de­ces­sors, but its attempts to under­stand and rep­re­sent Japan’s unique cul­ture and code of hon­our marks it as a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern war movie.