Midway

An uncommonly awful war picture, Midway details the events leading up to and following the attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War – with the movie specifically exploring the title battle and its impact on soldiers and civilians alike. It becomes clear almost immediately that Midway‘s biggest problem is its emphasis on aggressively one-dimensional characters, as filmmaker Roland Emmerich suffuses the proceedings with one comically stereotypical figure after another – which leaves a surprisingly talented cast, including Dennis Quaid and Patrick Wilson, struggling to transform their respective protagonists into more than just exposition-bearing mouthpieces. Emmerich’s facts-only, Wikipedia-friendly approach to Wes Tooke’s dry screenplay ensures that midway remains impossibly uninvolving almost from start to finish (the attack on Pearl Harbor is decent, admittedly), while the overuse of low-grade computer-generated special effects lends the majority of the movie’s battle sequences a chintzy, unconvincing feel – with this especially true of a seemingly endless finale that couldn’t possibly be less exciting or more anticlimactic. The end result is a predominantly interminable trainwreck that somehow makes Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor look sublime by comparison, which is a shame, certainly, given the inherently engrossing nature of the various true-life tales from which the movie’s drawn inspiration.

* out of ****