Midway (Collector's Edition) | Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda

Midway (Collector's Edition) | Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda | History soured by romantic mush!

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Midway (Collector'...

	Midway (Collector's Edition) Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda Universal Studios, 2001 average customer review:based on 169 reviews view larger image
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Accurate, but...

Insofar as "Midway" sticks to the actual history of the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, it's a pretty good film. The history is correct, the battles are depicted accurately and the sequence of events is laid out as it happened. The problem with Midway is that the makers apparantly didn't think the basic story was enough to hold viewers' interest, and so decided to wrap a love story between an Admiral's son and his Japanese-American girlfriend around it. Hello? Midway isn't interesting enough? The battle that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific and rewrote the book on naval strategy?

Nevertheless it's still worth watching. History buffs will enjoy how well the events are reconstructed and general viewers will enjoy the complex unfolding of events that make the story of Midway as gripping as any thriller.

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History soured by romantic mush!

This should have been a straight historical film, along the lines of Tora Tora Tora, The Longest Day, Gettysburg , and Of Gods and Generals, to make it the DEFINITIVE film on Midway. Unfortunately, the romantic side story and the use of the English language by the Japanese participants, turn this movie into another war-romance feature. A lot of stock footages from Tora Tora Tora were used (shades of the B westerns!). As to how Universal got access to these from Twentieth-Fox puzzles me. The use of actual battle color footages is distracting as the grainy quality and the different camera angles are obviously out of whack with the cinematographic structure of the presentation. Editing out the romantic side story would make this more palatable historically. That would make the film tighter as, as is, the film is already long winded.

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Not good movie making..but a guilty pleasure....

After reading some of the reviews posted here I had to sound off a little.
I saw this movie for the first time in its original thatrical release, when I was 10-11, and yes I was impressed. It was super loud it was bloody ( for its time based on what I had seen at that point) and it had a few dirty words in it, but most of all it had tremendous performances from some of the finest actors.
As I got older and began to see other films ( Tora Tora Tora, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo..) with which to compare Midway I quickly realised that this was a pretty lousy attempt at telling one of the great stories of WWII.
Most of the shots (not all,but most)have a T.V. feel and it comes across that the studio either spent all their money on the cast, or just didnt spend that much at all. Another reviewer said "if you look close enough" you might see a couple of shots from "Tora,Tora Tora". Come on 90% of the shots during the actual assault on Midway either came from "Tora...", or was actual war footage shot by John Ford. Which brings us to the "idea" of using combat camara footage in place of expensive sfx.Actual footage has never meshed with modern day film. This is why Ron Howard, and Tom Hanks never used any in their respective space program films.It only looks good if its being used as a news reel style footage.The first 15 min. of the movie is "30 Seconds Over Tokyo",which by the is a film I highly recommend.
As far as detail goes, well there are uniform faux pas all through. And thank god Hollywood in later years would learn to cut the performers hair to the proper length, because they sure didnt in the 70s.
All this brings us to the only redeeming quality in the movie...the wonderful perfomances. No one could ever play Nemitz like Henry Fonda, and I could go on, and on. Suffice to say I give this movie a guarded recommendation

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"Admiral Yamamoto, Tokyo has been bombed."

This movie is extremely historicly accurate, all the way down to the American servicemens' harsh, coarse language.
I love to study World War II, and am considered by many to be a amatuer historian, though one thing I always have trouble with is the extremely foul talk of the American soldiers. A good soldier should be able to speak his mind without spewing unwholesome words.
In the entire movie, I dared not count the number of cuss words spoken by the Americans, though, on the other end is the fact that throughout the entire movie, only ONE swear word was spoken by a Japanese soldier.
Other than the exessive swearing, it is a highly entertaining movie, with fast paced dogfights and slower times when top officers try to determine where the enemy is going to strike and where to feint his own ships. Their is also a smaller story being devoloped in that Charlton Heston's character's son falls in love with a Japanese-American woman, and the FBI arrest her on the charge of being a spy. Overall, this is a well done movie with the usual down-falls of exessive dirty talk. If you have a swear-word censor, this would be a good movie to get, but keep in mind that it will only work on dvds, as the videos do not have subtitles for the censor to read.