Midway is a 2019 production from Summit Entertainment and Centropolis Entertainment alongside a few smaller groups. The movie is directed by Roland Emmerich with the script being written by Wes Tooke. The movie has an extensive cast, although there are only a few major characters. These roles are portrayed by Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson and Luke Evans. The movie scores a 6.7/10 on IMDb but received a quite bad 47 Metascore.
The Story
Midway is a historically accurate retelling of the battle for Midway. I am always a fan of historic movies, especially if they try to stay true to the real story. While, as far as I know, Midway stays true to the story, the movie still lacks a story. The battle itself is not a story, it is more of an event within a story. Midway failed to create a convincing and interesting story around the battle that led to this movie being a bit of a disappointment for me.
The events happening before the battle are often extremely rushed and lack any deeper meaning than just being a filler. For example, we get introduced to some sort of party that almost every major character is attending but after like 5 minutes and 3 lines of dialogue we already hop on to the next scene, without seeing these characters truly interact with each other.
That lack of a good though-out story is combined with an immense pace made this movie rank quite low for me. One moment we are on an aircraft carrier, the next scene was back home in Pearl Harbor. While I could see that showing the time in between is not interesting, it could have made for a good opportunity to create some depth in the story by having the characters interact more with each other.
The Characters
The characters in this movie experience the same issue as the story, they are lacking depth. You could argue that Best, Layton, Nimitz and McClusky are the major characters in this movie, but apart from Best and one or two scenes with Layton, we get no chance to connect with them. Nimitz and McClusky barely have any screen time where they are doing something different than their usual job, while Best is the only one who received some love from the writer.
Best is the best character in this movie because he gets some more screentime while not flying a plane. We get to know his home situation, how he thinks about life and what he is like while he is not working. Those are things a viewer needs to know to connect with a character but apart from Best, we get no chance to.
The Production
The only thing keeping this movie from failing. You can see that the research was done to create a historically accurate movie that keeps thrill-seekers entertained for about an hour. The battle scenes were extremely well-made and often gets you to the edge of your seat. Although that is not such a hard job if you get the play around with aircraft carriers and dive bombers, still props for the production value.