Midway
/”Pearl Harbor is the greatest intelligence failure in American history.”
Filmology Rating: 1.5 out of 4
Midway was directed by Roland Emmerich and does a sort of re-telling/documenting of what John Ford had done. Emmerich, shamelessly, gave him a cameo in the film.
The story of the Battle of Midway, told by the leaders and the sailors who fought it.
There was a sense of trepidation I had when approaching this film because of the perceived notion that if you dislike a film like this, you are then dishonoring the true events and people involved. That is absolutely not the case. I have the utmost respect for those involved and those who have fought for this country. However, Roland Emmerich may be one of the worst directors who could have possibly tackled this film since Michael Bay and 'Pearl Harbor.' This film has possibly one of the worst structures, pacing, and editing of any film this year. That could be narrowed down to an utterly atrocious screenplay.
The screenplay itself feels like the writer had just finished his final draft and was ready to turn it in when, all the sudden, he tripped and fell. Now the pages are everywhere! Then, with the pitch meeting fast approaching, the screenwriter quickly picked up every page, shuffled them in random order, and handed in the script. And by some great miracle, someone greenlit the project.
No scene, in this entire film, feels like it contributes to a cohesive "story." And I'm being very, very careful on how I use the word "story." There is absolutely zero and I mean no characters in this entire film. In fact, there are too many and each of them are so void of three-dimensionality that each one has a singular trait that helps you keep track of who is who. One has glasses, one is the "hot-head" cliche character, one has a mustache, another one has a gravelly voice, another is Woody Harrelson.
Then the time-jumps make this film almost impossible to follow from a narrative perspective. Throughout the entire film, at the beginning of every single scene, you go, "Who? What? When? Where? Why?" That perfectly describes my experience seeing this film.
The dialogue is also very surface level. Nobody seems to have any kind of humanity because everyone is always discussing war tactics or the enemy, but I would have begged for a scene where two people sat down and had a conversation about interpersonal pathos or just about life in general.
You also never become invested in any aspect of the film. One of the forefront reasons is because it's so clearly obvious that the entire film was shot on a sound stage with green screen everywhere. It takes away from all believability and makes everything in the film absolutely weightless. So when a giant airplane crashes into a naval ship and creates a giant CGI explosion, you feel absolutely nothing because of how much CGI was utilized in the film. It felt like a 'Fast and Furious' film at times.
Subplots are also dropped and never mentioned again. Aaron Eckhart has this strange subplot, which appears out of nowhere, then disappears out of nowhere.
I can't even wrap my brain around how utterly incompetent this film is from a filmmaking, writing, pacing, structure, and editing perspective. Roland Emmerich is not ill-intentioned here, he just happens to have no clue how to address subject matter such as this. It's obvious that he wants to be Christopher Nolan and 'Dunkirk' really bad.
Rating: Skip It
-Nolan