Midway
MIDWAY - Lionsgate
Roland Emmerich returns behind the directors' chair after the critical and financial failure of his long gestured Will Smith lite sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, with Midway. A remake of the 1976 film of the same name, directed by Jack Smight, that offers a sizeable cast list of stars in a visually grand WWII epic.
Visually speaking, Midway is just short of being outstanding. The visual prowess and scale are genuinely phenomenal to see on the big screen. The smoke, fire and oil engulf the audience in a brilliant, radiating evocative fashion with the scope of this grand and defining sequence in history brought to the screen in all its might and terror. The film, rather interestingly, is not all that dark or gruesome and stays well within its rating. Never wanting to push the boundaries rather than one instance of a four-letter expletive delivered in the dampest sense of the word by none other than Nick Jonas — a sequence that rivals the terrible delivery of Tye Sheridan's Cyclops in Dark Pheonix.
The sound design, in particular, is fantastic to behold. It captures the chaos and intensity of both the attack on Pearl Harbour and the Battle of Midway in a terrifying manner. It is loud, brash and undoubtedly effective, keeping its audience involved continuously. However, the cinematography by Robby Baumgartner in the same breath is both grand in range yet still slightly underwhelming to behold. Aside from a few key sequences where the green screen and fake depth of field are ever so evident, Emmerich does a fantastic job of keeping the intensity and dramatic nature of the film for most of its one hundred and forty minutes running time. Thanks partly to the pacing with editor Adam Wolfe putting in a strong shift of very little fat and irrelevant sequences. That being said, with it being a tight trimmed feature there’s a significant level of depth and character development missing.
It is both a strong positive with Midway not skirting around unnecessary hollowness but acts as a negative in such a packed list of character actors; nobody particularly stands out for the audience to find engagement and connection. The performances throughout are all relatively strong. Namely, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson and Ed Skrein having plentiful amounts of screen-time but, as stated above, nothing particularly stands out with depth or development. It will always be a difficulty to push individualism in an ensemble and Midway suffers from not utilising a central character, even if it does slightly push Patrick Wilson in that direction.
The screenplay by Wes Tooke is also slightly underwhelming with the group dynamic, not only poorly crafted but quite unnatural and docile. Missing a considerable amount of emotional tension and dramatic intensity due to lacking quality from a screenwriter who can not nail dramatic moments. In addition, some considerable sub-plots and arcs are curated and suddenly forgotten or dropped with no finality, only to be justified in a line of history revealed at the end of the film. It is an element that happens far too often not to be a coincidence, so perhaps somewhere there exists a more extended cut, but each avenue that is suddenly forgotten severely dampens the overall impact Emmerich wants to convey.
Midway is released November 8th, 2019.
