What’s the point of scouring 1941 Navy
regulations to ground the real-life characters in
authentic military gear if they say stuff like this: “I
guess every battle needs a miracle.”
What’s the point of locating the original
blueprints of a gun, and then carefully recreating
it, if the script calls for an airman to tell his pilot:
“You fly like you don’t care if we come home.”
Emmerich has turned ”Midway ” into another
of his films, “Independence Day,” which was
cartoony but worked because we knew it was
over the top. Here, the director has taken real,
living men who acted heroically and turned
them into pulp comic strip characters. He might
need to apologize to them the most.
Screenwriter Wes Tooke has apparently never
seen a cliche he didn’t want to embrace. His script
is as textured and nuanced as an upbeat newsreel
from the ’40s. No, there’s no young G.I nicknamed
Brooklyn, but there are hotshot flyboys who stick
their chewing gum next to a photo of their wives
in the cockpit during dogfights.
Tooke’s one-dimensional characters help the
plot along by stating only the very obvious, like
“If we lose, we lose the Pacific” and “This place is
a powder keg.” (Keep that last one in mind; stuff
will blow up and it will be called foreshadowing.)
The Battle of Midway took place between June
4-7, 1942, and pitted Japanese Adm. Isoroku
Yamamoto, architect of the raid on Pearl Harbor,
against U.S. Navy Adm. Chester Nimitz. The U.S.
had been stung by the sneak attack in Hawaii
and were underdogs in the Pacific.
But the U.S. Navy, having cracked Japan’s