I said I was going to try to watch Midway (2019), and I did. I’m not going to criticize the special effects quality, because obviously you can’t find many WW2-era aircraft and fly them around to make a movie, so a lot of digitally-created aircraft and ships were necessary. However, there were lot of details in the special effects I found puzzling, like the small tails on the B-26 medium bombers, and the tiny bombs on the SBD Dauntless dive bombers. Why?
More important and more puzzling to me were the way the events in the full story were depicted, and the events not mentioned that I thought should have been mentioned. For example, I don’t understand why there wasn’t a more full and clear depiction of the way the torpedo squadrons the US sent to attack the Japanese carriers were systematically destroyed by the screening Japanese A6M fighter aircraft before they could get close enough to make a successful attack. The movie showed a lot of US aircraft being shot down, but the movie seems to depict this as coming about from anti-aircraft fire, which was not the case, and it doesn’t show the squadrons being decimated one by one, which would have better highlighted the number of lives lost by the US Navy aircraft crews.
In particular, there should have been a more explicit depiction of how outclassed some of the US aircraft were by the Japanese A6M fighter, and how little prepared many of the US aircraft crews were to fight and survive. Many of the gunners in the back seat of the dive bombers and torpedo bombers had never even fired their guns in flight. And front line US aircraft like the Brewster F2A Buffalo fighter and SB2U Vindicator dive bomber were death traps to their crews, as they were easily out-maneuvered by the Japanese “Zero” fighters.
Similarly, the loss of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown was only briefly mentioned. Yet the story of its sinking was prolonged and relatively complex, with a lot of human drama that would have made for a more interesting and balanced movie. I had the same reaction to the cursory attention to the attack by the Japanese Navy on the Midway atoll. They did a good job showing the story of how John Ford was there, and insisted on shooting film during the battle, but there could have been more focus on the preparation of the base on Midway, as the atoll was the focus of the attack by the Japanese.
In the aerial battles around the Japanese carriers, the story of the events that occurred would have made more sense to viewers as they unfolded if there had been more explanation in the movie about which carriers were being attacked, and which US squadrons were attacking them. The various squadrons could have been identified as to their origin (i.e. based on Midway or the Yorktown, or the Enterprise, etc.). The overall picture of the battle would have been more clear that way, than the haphazard action depicted in the movie. Yes, the attacks did not occur as planned, but there was some coordination attempted, and some achieved. It would have made the movie more meaningful to show more about the details of who was attacking which ships at which times, and how the attempted coordination fell apart, and how the desperate, last-second attempts at coordination succeeded for the US forces.
After all, the US forces made many severe mistakes in attacking the Japanese carriers. For example, in most cases the aircraft attacked from the same side of each carrier - failing to split the anti-aircraft fire coming from the ships. And the US torpedo and dive bombers rarely met up with the fighter aircraft they needed for protection - the planned meetings before the attacks failed in almost every case. This should have been shown in the movie, because it would have made the outcome seem even more unexpected and surprising than it appeared in the movie. For this reason, there is no excuse for not making clear that the US aircraft destroyed three Japanese carriers within less than ten minutes, and the fourth shortly after that. It seemed to me that this would have been a major highlight to mention in the movie, for dramatic effect, especially after the previous attacks had failed miserably and resulted in a terrible loss of aircraft and life for the US.
It is also mystifying to see the movie show the US submarine fire one torpedo at the Japanese fleet, which missed its intended target. In fact, the US sub fired several torpedoes, and one of them probably hit a carrier. Unfortunately, few US torpedoes at that point in the war actually exploded upon impact, so the torpedo that hit the Japanese carrier did not explode. This would have been another interesting fact to get into the movie. I also don’t understand why the movie showed at least one US dive bomber flying lengthwise across a Japanese aircraft carrier and dropping a bomb just a few feet above the deck of the ship. That didn’t happen. That’s just silly. There was at least one US aircraft that dived into a Japanese ship after being disabled and going out of control, but no aircraft did level bombing a few feet above the deck of the target on purpose. Some of the dialog was equally unrealistic - especially the questioning of the decisions of the Japanese commanders by their subordinates. Some of that dialog was clearly inserted in the script to explain the facts to viewers, but those facts could have been shown without dialog more realistically, I think.
Interesting movie depiction of a complex battle. I guess I can’t expect every detail I found most interesting to be included, but in total I felt that the story would have been more interesting and understandable if it were presented a little differently, with fewer dramatic embellishments that weren’t realistic.
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