Midway Parent Guide

Following the carnage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the United States needs to find a way to seize the initiative in the war in the Pacific. Naval intelligence officer Lt. Commander Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson) believes that the Japanese intend to strike at the US base on Midway Island, and that an ambush there could cripple the Japanese surface fleet. It falls to newly installed Fleet Admiral Nimitz (Woody Harrelson) to coordinate the operation, which includes Lt. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s (Aaron Eckhart) raid on Tokyo and Admiral Halsey’s (Dennis Quaid) maneuvering in the South Pacific. Meanwhile, aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise, Lt. Commander Wade McClusky (Luke Evans) and Lieutenant Dick Best (Ed Skrein) coordinate the bombers and torpedo planes which the U.S. Navy will rely on to sink the Japanese fleet.

This is the worst sort of war film. Completely devoid of any nuance, character, or historical perspective, Midway instead sensationalizes the violence of war and unleashes all the unbridled patriotism it can muster. It features the most over the top All-American cast ever assembled, with jawlines stronger than the fleet, all of whom have functionally identical character traits. The writing doesn’t stop there, penning dialogue so banal it feels like the movie was churned out by a computer.

For those of you who like to watch impressive spectacles on a big screen, I’ll concede that Midway does scale well. The aircraft carriers and battleships loom out of the sea like mountains coming out of the waves. Bullets whiz past the screen at a terrifying rate, and planes dodge and swerve at lunatic speeds. None of that compensates for the fact that I’ve seen more compelling action in video game cutscenes. Without any sense of character or appropriate context, this might as well be happening in space.

That’s what bothers me about movies like this. When you see Japanese planes gunning across Battleship Row, or American bombers lighting up Tokyo like a Christmas tree, that’s all you see. You don’t see the civilian casualties, the families of the downed airmen, or the larger political ramifications. In context, it’s hard to look at American bombers over large Japanese cities without remembering how nearly a quarter of a million civilians would be killed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima three years later. It’s difficult to watch the Japanese Navy casually killing prisoners without thinking of the Rape of Nanking, or the Bataan Death March. None of those events make for fun popcorn movie shots, but without them, the consequences of battles like Midway are fuzzy and unimportant.

Parental concerns will chiefly be with violence, although for a large war film, there is remarkably little gore. With the exception of some blood and a few shots of severely burned corpses, the deaths in the film largely occur in the impersonal confines of distant aircraft or naval vessels, with very few deaths being directly shown on screen.

At the end of the day, Midway is a two-and-a-half hour slog of lazy cinema attempting to capitalize on the most brutal and devastating conflict in human history. Not that the film endeavors to look closely at the human cost, since it’s too busy painting its star-spangled awesome Americans and over-confident imperialistic Japanese. With nothing else on its plate, this production sets off explosions like a kid with a box of firecrackers. No amount of special effect stunts or high-profile acting talent will compensate for the interminably atrocious writing, or the callous indifference to historical events and human suffering.