Midway review: America takes the fight to Japan in a thrilling, surprisingly even-handed period Top Gun
Dir: Roland Emmerich. Cast: Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, Woody Harrelson, Luke Evans, Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore. 12A cert, 138 mins
History has not tended to be Roland Emmerich’s forte. As a popcorn catastrophist, the German director is best-known for staging goofy alien invasions (Independence Day), a new ice age (The Day After Tomorrow) or a wild deluge of Biblical disasters (2012). But when his films purport to be based on fact – whether caricaturing the American War of Independence in The Patriot, pimping out the Oxfordian theory in Anonymous, or mangling the birth of gay rights in Stonewall – they seem more ridiculous still.
Midway is a handy exception to the rule. Emmerich’s recreation of the 1942 naval battle between America and Japan, which changed the course of the war, exists squarely in a zone of reckless, shameless blockbuster derring-do. But his film is crudely honourable with it, managing to resist the levels of jingoistic bombast we might have dreaded. Simply put, it’s a lot dumber than Dunkirk, but never as pandering as Pearl Harbor.
Fans of square jaws and shoulder-clapping are in for a treat: among the decorated officer class, you get Woody Harrelson winning the day in a tidy white wig as Admiral Chester Nimitz, Dennis Quaid giving gruff salutes to all the brave young flyboys, and Aaron Eckhart striding around with a bomber jacket in occupied China. Even the Japanese get an occasional look-in.
The context is clear as day. Pearl Harbor has just been strafed – the film’s first set-piece, which is also the ugliest going, a digital horrorshow that lacks any effective sense of human scale. Never mind: it fulfils a prediction by the intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson, reliably good at delivering bad news) that the US Navy wishes it had heeded earlier. They take their fight to this implacable new enemy by anticipating the locus of next attack – Midway, in the North Pacific, where American cryptographers managed to forestall an ambush.
By targeting Japan’s three aircraft carriers in a series of go-for-broke dive-bomber raids, the Americans scored a tactically brilliant victory, up there with Salamis in 480 BC. And it’s this stuff Emmerich really aces. The film is period Top Gun with the winking homoeroticism to prove it.
“I fly with your husband,” says Luke Evans’s dashing pilot suggestively, speaking to an impervious slab of fashion plate played by Mandy Moore, whose spouse, another real-life figure and the film’s main character, goes by the gloriously alpha name of Dick Best (Ed Skrein).
These and fellow hotshots take to the skies in some of the most thrillingly vertiginous dogfight sequences we’ve lately seen. Emmerich gets gripping, Dam Busters-style suspense from prolonging the crash dives until the last possible moment, when the payload gets dropped – in one case, right onto the red disc of Japan’s national flag, at a carrier’s front end. In your face, Hirohito!
There’s a cameo for Hollywood legend John Ford (Geoffrey Blake), who’d been sent to the islands to make a standard documentary about wartime life there, and wound up shooting enough action to make his 18-minute short The Battle of Midway (1942), sustaining a bullet wound in the process.
The film could have done with more Nick Jonas – I’m quite serious – as a daredevil machinist called Bruno Gaido, who managed to thwart a kamikaze dive on the USS Enterprise: diving into a waiting cockpit on the flight deck, he shot out an engine and lopsided the approaching plane in the nick of time.
With his dapper pencil ’tache and jaunty, Italian-American patter, Jonas puts in a jolly if short-lived showing. Next to him, most of the younger supporting cast are all but interchangeable, and Skrein is a nagging problem: his hawkish good looks make him a tough aviator to care about, and while you wait for him to win you over as the hero of the hour, it never quite happens. Meanwhile, Eckhart’s Gen Jimmy Doolittle gets short shrift – perhaps because Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, with Alec Baldwin in the same role, dealt already with the retaliatory Doolittle raid on Tokyo.
A mixed bag in all these ways, Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.
When an American plane crashes into the sea perilously close to one of the carriers – aiming to hit? – the Japanese admiral assumes the controls must have jammed in the sky. “Americans aren’t that brave,” he flatly argues. It’s not a line you can ever imagine a Bay film letting stand.
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