Midway trailer -- 2019
 

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

Thanks for that Ed,

Here's a trailer for "The Cold Blue" (a documentary):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmwm4VPW7RY

P.S. I thought the flying sequences in the first episode of the TV "Catch-22" looked good. For once with CGI the planes weren't rigidly fixed in formation, their positions varied constantly as happens when humans are at the controls.

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

You're welcome Nick. And thanks for The Code Blue link. I had no interest in the Catch-22 story but was amazed by the attention to detail in the two trailers I saw.


Ed

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

If you haven’t read Catch-22, I’d really recommend it.

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

I've seen The Cold Blue and the new Catch-22 serie. I highly advise the former but have confused feelings on the second. I have not read the book, neither seen the old movie, but it feels quite weird but I have some good laugh.

For the Midway movie, we can feel from this trailer the frustration of Roland Emmerich to not have been able to make his own Pearl Harbor movie. I'm wondering how much of the movie is dedicated to the Battle of Midway and how much to other events of the first six month of the Pacific War.

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

"I have not read the book, … but it feels quite weird …"

So does the book but it all makes perfect sense if you stick with it — and it is really funny along the way.

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

New Midway trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfTYY_pac8o

Ed

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

The original title was "Pearl Harbor II"

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

Agree 100% with Nick about the book Catch-22. First read it about 40 years ago and I re-read it every 5 years or so because it's that good, and I'm definitely not one to read fiction.

Cold Blue looks really good/interesting.

Midway gets a hard pass from me. The trailers made my head explode...

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

I have watched cold blue at HBO, it is a great documentary, about Midway movie, I have to admit I have serious doubt about the quality of this movie, I cannot imagine the director of movie like "Independence day" and "White House Down" could make a great movie about Midway, I hope I was wrong, but I predict this would be a typical Hollywood war movie about cheap love stories plus some eye-catching special effects. Don't get me wrong, Hollywood used to making great war movie such as General Patton, memphis belle, saving private Ryan, but these days were gone

Re: Midway trailer -- 2019
 

As bad as expected

Review: ‘Midway’ turns the WW II battle into a cartoon
by Mark Kennedy

The first thing director Roland Emmerich should do after his latest movie “Midway” hits theaters is apologize.

Apologize to the visual effects crew, the stuntmen, the carpenters, the costumers and artists. He has squandered their considerable visual skill in retelling the crucial World War II battle at Midway by melding some of the best action sequences in years with the most banal of words.

What’s the point of scouring 1941 Navy regulations to ground the real-life characters in authentic military gear if they say stuff like this: “I guess every battle needs a miracle.”

What’s the point of locating the original blueprints of a gun, and then carefully recreating it, if the script calls for an airman to tell his pilot: “You fly like you don’t care if we come home.”

Emmerich has turned ”Midway ” into another of his films, “Independence Day,” which was cartoony but worked because we knew it was over the top. Here, the director has taken real, living men who acted heroically and turned them into pulp comic strip characters. He might need to apologize to them the most.

Screenwriter Wes Tooke has apparently never seen a cliche he didn’t want to embrace. His script is as textured and nuanced as an upbeat newsreel from the ’40s. No, there’s no young G.I nicknamed Brooklyn, but there are hotshot flyboys who stick their chewing gum next to a photo of their wives in the cockpit during dogfights.

Tooke’s one-dimensional characters help the plot along by stating only the very obvious, like “If we lose, we lose the Pacific” and “This place is a powder keg.” (Keep that last one in mind; stuff will blow up and it will be called foreshadowing.)

The Battle of Midway took place between June 4-7, 1942, and pitted Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the raid on Pearl Harbor, against U.S. Navy Adm. Chester Nimitz. The U.S. had been stung by the sneak attack in Hawaii and were underdogs in the Pacific.

But the U.S. Navy, having cracked Japan’s code system, anticipated Japanese naval movements and gained the upper hand. The battle ended Japan’s aspirations of naval dominance in the Pacific and showed the Allies that victory was possible.

Like its cousin in WW II filmed failure, the Ben Affleck-led “Pearl Harbor,” Emmerich has decided to tell this sprawling story using multiple characters, including showing the Japanese side. Hint: Everyone is brave.

In the actual battle theater are the brave, bad-boy bomber pilot Dick Best (Ed Skrein), the brave but more cautious Clarence Dickinson (Luke Kleintank), the downhome brave Admiral William “Bull” Halsey (Dennis Quaid), the swaggeringly brave Jimmy Doolittle (Aaron Eckhart) and the brave and cocksure Bruno Gaido (a mustachioed Nick Jonas, reaching the very limits of his acting skills).

You can instantly tell why these actors signed up. Jonas gets to shoot an anti-aircraft artillery gun at a plunging Japanese Zero and prove his courage. “That was the bravest damn thing I’ve ever seen. What’s your name, son?” an awed officer says. Skrein, as Best, gets to be a daredevil pilot who is admired by everyone. “Men like Dick Best are the reason we’re gonna win this war,” says one awed pilot. Eckhart gets to strut about in a leather flying jacket and look awesome.

Onshore there are the brave intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson) and the brave outside-the-box Nimitz (Woody Harrelson). The Japanese are elegant, contained and brave, too, especially Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) and Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi (Tadanobu Asano).

Tooke has presumably met women in real life but really doesn’t prove here that he knows how they think or speak at all. They, too, are brave — frustrated that their men are constantly working hard at saving democracy but understanding. (One nicely declares to her exhausted spouse: “I’ll fix you a sandwich.”) Mandy Moore, utterly wasted as Best’s wife, says things like “I’ve never seen you this worried before” and “Come to bed.” We’re told she is a “firecracker.” It is hard to believe this film came after “Saving Private Ryan” and “Dunkirk.”

Credit to Emmerich and his filmmakers for telling this battle from the air, ships and underwater (we get to see the staff of the USS Nautilus submarine) and the images are striking — gut-twisting bomber runs and pumping ammunition. But once again, even in the face of this cinematic and real-life triumph, the dialogue is paper thin.

“We did it!” says a pilot at the end, after they obviously did it. Another, dropping ordnance onto a Japanese carrier, states the obvious: “This is for Pearl.” ″Midway” might be a film best watched if you switch off the volume.

“Midway,” a Lionsgate release, is rated PG-13 for “sequences of war violence and related images, language and smoking.” Running time: 138 minutes. One star out of four.

https://apnews.com/8f51f41b374b450f912513a3cf0b9f79