Never in the history of war movies have so few thrills been delivered by so much mayhem and destruction. The attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the battle of Midway six months later have been brought to the screen with boredom-inspiring spectacle by Roland Emmerich. The film is a passion project and comes with a guarantee that its events are historically accurate.
This is the director who sent aliens to invade Earth in Independence Day and armed the president with a rocket launcher in White House Down. But now Emmerich is getting serious, carving a great monument of a movie, a cinematic statue to the bravery of the young men who sacrificed their lives in the Pacific. And like watching a statue for two and a half hours, there’s nothing to do but sit back and yawn.
The film begins with Pearl Harbor, a battle scene that, like the set pieces that follow, hurls a barrage of CGI with some mild 12A-rated carnage that never offers a real sense of jeopardy. Ed Skrein, the British actor from Deadpool, is Lieutenant Dick Best, a showoff pilot whose “cowboy bullshit” in the cockpit is thwarting his promotion chances to squadron commander. Skrein does his best, but a couple of tics – gum chewing and a thick New Jersey accent – do not a character make.
The most interesting strand of the movie involves Patrick Wilson as intelligence officer Edwin Layton, whose warnings about a Japanese attack were repeatedly ignored by top brass. Woody Harrelson (looking distractingly like Ted Danson with bleached white hair) is the newly appointed commander of the Pacific fleet, Admiral Nimitz, a man who overcomes his instinctive mistrust of the geeks in the codebreaking unit to take heed of their intelligence about a new Japanese assault.
The Americans go into the battle of Midway as underdogs, outmanned and outgunned, but with the element of surprise on their side this time: the Japanese are unaware that their naval messages are being intercepted. The clash of firepower when it comes is a colossal thundering snore of a battle. But the heroism of dive bombers like Dick is something to behold as they fly their planes nose down to get as close as possible to the enemy target. Today, the whole thing would be executed by unmanned drones operated thousands of miles from the war zone.
Emmerich goes mercifully easy on the flag-waving patriotism, and he’s pretty even-handed, too, in his portrayal of the Japanese enemy. But his film never really grapples with the human cost of war, and the death of so many young men. A big, long, loud, boring history lesson, it’s a movie that opens a distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s. Emmerich and his scriptwriter Wes Tooke seem to be saying: “Look at these feisty brave boys, who strapped into planes on doomed missions – they did it for our freedom.” The best thing to do with this movie would be to take cover and wait for it to pass.
• Midway is released in the UK and the US on 8 November and in Australia on 28 November.
