Film Review - Midway (2020)

Midway is directed by Roland Emmerich who made Independence Day and concerns the Battle of Midway during World War 2 in 1942 where the Japanese after attacking Pearl Harbour drag the United States into the War and might have the American forces on the run in the Pacific but the Americans will not go quietly into the night.

They will not vanish without a fight,
Their going to live on,
Their going to survive,
For today they launch their own counterattack.

I’m sorry I couldn’t resist that nod to the great speech scene from Independence Day which is a big favorite of mine and as a result of that film has made me a near complete total sucker for Mr Boombastic aka Mr Emmerich so I went into this hoping I would have some boom boom fun on the bun.

And again it’s a perfectly fine movie that certainly delivers on the spectacle front with nice lovely battle scenes of planes flying and fighting in the sky trying to sink those battleships and I enjoyed those scenes more than I enjoyed the films main storyline.

And look the overall storytelling isn’t bad but its very predictable in terms of the Americans are losing, their planes are getting shot out of the sky, the Japanese are planning something big and commanding officers stand around giving big speeches (though they can’t match President Thomas Whitmore’s speech where he inspired all of mankind to fight for their right to live, to exist) with one literally reminding me of Alec Baldwin in Pearl Harbor.

As for the cast their all perfectly fine, Aaron Eckhart, Ed Skrein, Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, Nick Jonas and Luke Evans all play their parts well enough though they really end up hitting the very familiar beats that these films can sometimes ask them to hit.

And so that was Midway and look its perfectly fine and it does the job and brings the boombastic well enough even if it isn’t very fantastic, 2 out of 5.