The traditional war film went into something of a decline in the 1970s, and "Midway" is one of the few examples from the second half of the decade. It features an impressive line-up of top Hollywood stars, including Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford and Hal Holbrook. Some other big names, including Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner and James Coburn, all appear in relatively minor roles. The well- known Japanese actor, Toshiro Mifune, plays Admiral Yamamoto, although his lines had to be dubbed into English; most of the other Japanese roles are played by Japanese-Americans such as James Shigeta and Pat Morita.
Most of the big-name stars play real-life individuals; Fonda and Ford, for example, play the American commanders Chester W. Nimitz and Raymond A. Spruance. The main exception is Heston who plays the fictitious Major Matt Garth, a naval pilot who takes part in the battle. The film is mostly a factual account of the battle itself, but it also involves a fictional sub-plot. Garth's son Tom, like his father a naval pilot, has fallen in love with a Japanese-American girl who has been interned along with the rest of her family.
The film has one or two flaws. The romantic subplot struck me as unnecessary and was not well integrated with the rest of the film. There was on over-reliance on stock footage in the combat scenes. Trying to recreate these events might have been expensive, but the old newsreel shots have a very different look to the rest of the film and tend to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. The film-makers have also been criticised for using one ship, the USS Lexington, to represent all the carriers involved in the battle, whether American or Japanese, but in this instance they really had no alternative. All the Japanese carriers involved are now at the bottom of the Pacific, and it would not have been feasible to try and construct replicas. (James Cameron might have tried, however, had he been acting as director).
As I said, this is a fairly traditional war film, but in one respect (apart from the use of colour) it clearly reflects the fact that it was made in 1976 rather than, say, 1946 or 1956. A film about the Battle of Midway made just after the war, and certainly one made during the war itself, would have been made with a much more propagandist agenda in mind, emphasising the moral superiority of the Allied cause and probably depicting the Japanese as bloodthirsty warmongers. There was none of this in this film; the battle is simply shown as the clash of two navies, not the clash of two ideologies, and certainly not as the clash of good and evil. There is no suggestion that the Japanese commanders are any less honourable than their American counterparts. Perhaps the trauma of Vietnam had made Americans less confident of their own moral superiority in foreign affairs than they had been previously.
The standards of acting are fairly high, but as is often the case with ensemble casts of this nature there is no one outstanding contribution. Anyone familiar with World War II will of course know how the battle ended, but for anyone else director Jack Smight is able to conjure up a fair degree of excitement. Rather oddly, this is generated not just by the battle-scenes themselves, which are nothing particularly special, but also by the tense game of cat-and-mouse show in the earlier scenes as both sides try to work out their tactics without being 100% aware of the strength and location of the enemy forces. At the end we are left realising just how big a part luck played in the American victory at a time when defeat could have led to the war taking a very different course. 7/10
Most of the big-name stars play real-life individuals; Fonda and Ford, for example, play the American commanders Chester W. Nimitz and Raymond A. Spruance. The main exception is Heston who plays the fictitious Major Matt Garth, a naval pilot who takes part in the battle. The film is mostly a factual account of the battle itself, but it also involves a fictional sub-plot. Garth's son Tom, like his father a naval pilot, has fallen in love with a Japanese-American girl who has been interned along with the rest of her family.
The film has one or two flaws. The romantic subplot struck me as unnecessary and was not well integrated with the rest of the film. There was on over-reliance on stock footage in the combat scenes. Trying to recreate these events might have been expensive, but the old newsreel shots have a very different look to the rest of the film and tend to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. The film-makers have also been criticised for using one ship, the USS Lexington, to represent all the carriers involved in the battle, whether American or Japanese, but in this instance they really had no alternative. All the Japanese carriers involved are now at the bottom of the Pacific, and it would not have been feasible to try and construct replicas. (James Cameron might have tried, however, had he been acting as director).
As I said, this is a fairly traditional war film, but in one respect (apart from the use of colour) it clearly reflects the fact that it was made in 1976 rather than, say, 1946 or 1956. A film about the Battle of Midway made just after the war, and certainly one made during the war itself, would have been made with a much more propagandist agenda in mind, emphasising the moral superiority of the Allied cause and probably depicting the Japanese as bloodthirsty warmongers. There was none of this in this film; the battle is simply shown as the clash of two navies, not the clash of two ideologies, and certainly not as the clash of good and evil. There is no suggestion that the Japanese commanders are any less honourable than their American counterparts. Perhaps the trauma of Vietnam had made Americans less confident of their own moral superiority in foreign affairs than they had been previously.
The standards of acting are fairly high, but as is often the case with ensemble casts of this nature there is no one outstanding contribution. Anyone familiar with World War II will of course know how the battle ended, but for anyone else director Jack Smight is able to conjure up a fair degree of excitement. Rather oddly, this is generated not just by the battle-scenes themselves, which are nothing particularly special, but also by the tense game of cat-and-mouse show in the earlier scenes as both sides try to work out their tactics without being 100% aware of the strength and location of the enemy forces. At the end we are left realising just how big a part luck played in the American victory at a time when defeat could have led to the war taking a very different course. 7/10