everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Better Late Then Never

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Unlike Tora, Tora, Tora, which also dealt with the Pacific War between the U.S. and Japan, Midway employed American actors and actresses of the Japanese descent. I think it was the first mistake. Somehow the Japanese actors didn't sound and look real.The beginning of the movie was good. The B-17 raid of Tokyo off a U.S. aircraft carrier alerting the Japanese military leaders seemed tense and realistic. But the moment the movie began to develop characters, it began to slow down -- way down. I think it was totally unrealistic to introduce a Japanese-American girl who is the object of affection of a Naval officer. The producers wanted to convey the message that it was the Imperial Japan, not the Japanese people, was the enemy, but it was syrupy, predictable and boring.The climax of the movie has to be the surprise attack by the American dive bombers on Japanese carriers, but it was rather anticlimactic. Couldn't they have come up with better exclamations that "Hooray" and "Hail Mary"? were

If You are Young and not that Familiar with the Stock WWII Footage that was used in this Film for that "The way it was." Feel, this Might be a Somewhat Satisfying Entertainment and a Primer for the Important Naval Battle. You also have to be a Youngster and New to Movies to Gloss Over the Bad Acting and Dialog and the Cartoonish Presentation of the Non-Battle Scenes and the Battle Scenes that were Lifted from Numerous Other Movies.Problem is that the Non-Battle Scenes are So Bad that Wading through the Waves of Anachronistic Haircuts and Over the Hill Actors Paraded Out for a Scene or Two do Nothing but make the Whole Exercise Quite Laborious.This is a Bomb. A Misfire. It is a Bad Production with Clunky Intertwines and Confusing Scenes of Aircraft and Flattops Floating and Flying Around with Hardly a Hint at their Position and what it All Means. Despite the Laughable On Screen Titles like...such and such Airplane, 30 Miles from such and such Ship. Even the Filmmakers Knew that None of this made much Sense to the Audience and so They Literally had to Spell it Out.Listing the All-Star Cast is Futile (some are only on screen for half a heartbeat and others like Glenn Ford just stare out a window), but Suffice to Say that Charlton Heston and Crew All Look Bored and Firmly Planted in the 1970's not the 1940's both in Style and Script.

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

This movie starts off with the famous "Doolittle Raid" on Japan by B-25 bombers taking off from the U.S.S. Hornet. Although the actual raid didn't do much damage it essentially resulted in the Japanese decision to attempt another surprise attack upon the American fleet. This time however, rather than attack Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy decided to invade Midway and hoped to catch what few American carriers were left out in the open for a decisive battle. Now, although this movie doesn't have the special effects that "Tora! Tora! Tora!" had 6 years earlier it does have more in-depth characters and better acting. Likewise, from an American point-of-view it also has a better historical ending than the aforementioned film. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier "Tora! Tora! Tora!" had outstanding special effects and action and in an apparent effort to bolster these two areas "Midway" reuses some footage from that movie along with film from actual World War 2 tape. Some might like that but I thought it was a bit cheap and dishonest. Be that as it may, I figure the entertainment value is still pretty good and I rate this movie as slightly above average.