Midway

Movie Review: Midway

Year of Release: 1976
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Jack Smight
Cast: Charlton Heston, Edward Albert, Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Glenn Ford

Plot outline: A dramatization of the battle that turned out to be the turning point of the Pacific theatre of World War II (IMDb).

The battle - history - survives while the movie blows up harmlessly in a confusion of familiar old newsreel footage, idiotic fiction war movie clichés, and a series of wooden-faced performances by almost a dozen male stars, some of whom appear so briefly that recognizing them is like taking a World War II aircraft-identification test: Is that a single-wing Robert Mitchum? A modified Cliff Robertson? A rebuilt Glenn Ford? The movie attempts to recreate the circumstances leading up to the battle of Midway Island, June 4-5, 1942, when a perilously small US Navy task force decisively defeated Admiral Yamamoto's much larger Japanese fleet whose mission had been the invasion and occupation of Midway. Most of these things are reported quite dutifully by the movie. It solemnly cross-cuts between the war councils, chart rooms and communications offices on the American side and those on the Japanese side, with characters, who often have to be identified by subtitles, laboriously trying to give us all of the exposition necessary to make the battle coherent. There's no way to act such roles, though Henry Fonda as Admiral Nimitz shows a certain amount of ease reading decoded messages and shaking hands with junior officers. Charlton Heston plays a fictional character who might have been stolen from some terrible movie made shortly after World War II. He is given the movie's silliest lines, though the fact that there really was an Admiral Yamamoto doesn't exactly protect Toshiro Mifune from his share of duds. "Ah," says the movie's Yamamoto when informed of Gen. Jimmy Doolittle's token air raid on Tokyo in early 1942, "this is a blessing in disguise. There'll be no more foot-dragging by the general staff." Small-talk among flag officers is one of the movie's more minor problems. The major one is the battle, which is a badly edited and badly matched series of scenes made up of studio stuff, miniatures and actual battle footage. The director and his editors also appear to repeat battle footage when it's really good. Maybe not, but it certainly seems that way. (NYT)

My judgement: **1/2 out of 4 stars