A WOKE! Film Review As Awards Season Begins... by Lucas Avram Cavazos
Midway ###-1/2
Roland Emmerich is the mind behind the helming of huge blockbusters Stargate in 1994 and Independence Day a couple of years later. These flicks created stars and launched careers, but Emmerich went on to continue creating mega-movies that required big budgets, special effects and often (for this critic and viewer) way too much suspension of disbelief…e.g., Universal Soldier, his disaster flicks like Day After Tomorrow and 2012, Godzilla, the heinous Stonewall violation and yes, even the Independence Day sequel from three years ago. I would also note that he is one of only two big budget directors who is gay and can still draw your atypical, straight male, aged 18-49 audience to his flicks. The other man would be Bryan Singer but as he is a paedophile piece of shit whose actions ruined the joy that was The X-Men and savagely drivelled out his take on Freddie Mercury, only to then be removed as director, we’ll not speak of his nasty, botoxed-ass face.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was one of the only (if not the only) Mexican-American naval admirals during the WWII era, so watching this film really kept putting a lot of my mother’s yapping over the years into focus and later became a notice of something awry, but we shall speak of that later. This autumn’s big (and a tad desperate attempt) at wooing Oscar falls a bit right of the middle, (almost) like a poor man’s version of a Dunkirk endeavour, though it’s fair to say that Emmerich and Christopher Nolan are very different directors.
Starting briefly in 1937 with an also quick meeting between Japanese Marshal Admiral Yamamoto and US intelligence officer, and a lead character in the film, Edwin Layton (never-ageing Patrick Wilson) where Yamamoto tells him that the Japanese will do whatever necessary if their oil supplies are in any way jeopardised. Fast forward four years, the world is at war, and what starts off as a film with way too many sappy one-liners that are ultra-cringeworthy soon turns into a visual tour de force that is incredible as much as it is laborious.
For certain, while Emmerich and film rookie writer Wes Tooke pull out all the wannabe-an-epic stops with a semi-lock on military vernacular and shoddy banter, they also do a decent job of covering the Pearl Harbor drama that securely put the US into World War II, and they end up nailing it with a lot of historical accuracies. From documenting the Doolittle Raids (Jimmy Doolittle is played here by a where’s-he-been Aaron Eckhart) to US cryptographers breaking some of the Japanese codes to highlighting the inefficiency of US weapons and their ridiculous uses, even bringing in cinema director John Ford and his presence during a Japanese raid that made its way into one of his movies, they accurately get a show-in of facts as the plot plods along. What does not seem to make its way into the film is a sense of realness expressed by the myriad of stereotypes employed here from the goofy Italiano-type guys to the smarmy Southerner to the golly shucks whitey fords, it seems that every 40s, male, US-American film role was taken up by someone except that there was not a single, solid scene that had any African or Native or Latin-American or Asian-American person in the mix here at all, despite the fact that millions of them, as well as, more than half a million Jews and Arabs and Armenians and so many more served hand-in-hand with the nearly 16 million men and women who comprised some part of the armed services during the WWII years. As a tutor and student of history, I take issue with that, and I also wonder if Emmerich had actually been from the US, would he have paid a tad more attention to that? I’d like to think so, but sincerely doubt it at the same time...Yet I digress.
It seems to me that the glory of Midway lies in its impeccable action sequences which engage the audience so vividly that it is virtually impossible not to stay glued to the intensity being displayed so spectacularly before you, but then that is exactly the stuff that big war movies are made of. Well…that and a huge lineup of stars to draw different audiences from all over the entertainment spectrum. To note, and in addition to anyone named above, we also have Woody Harrelson, Luke Evans, the odd-looking Ed Skrein, Darren Criss, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, and even Nickalicious Jonas, playing the role of an ill-fated pilot. I kept seeing a new actor every ten minutes and thinking, ‘Oh shit, is that so-and-so?’…and it was so-and so!
Now while I would likely be safe to predict that there may be a nomination thrown in for some of the effects sequences perhaps, this mediocre war film is not likely to pick up any major love come awards season soon, but what it does do in its own way is completely highlight all the chaos of the attacks over three crucial days in US and Japanese history. The battle moments fought over a blazingly clear and sunlit sky serves to add credence to the heroic and insane nature of the US and Japanese pilots, but what it also does is introduce just how vital passing through this evil war was in relevance to what would turn out to be this modern age.