This is a rather impressive depiction of the Battle of Midway which occurred in June 1942 - the next major naval confrontation between the USA and Japan following the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941. The story is told from both angles in quite some detail, and comes to the conclusion that the outcome was as much a ‘victory’ to the US through good fortune as much as superior planning, tactics and weaponry. And, if further proof were needed, it proved decisively that air power rather than sea power would be the single most important factor in bringing the Pacific War to a close.

It can be seen from the attention to detail in the storyline that the initial plan had been to create a documentary rather than a motion picture - the only licence to fiction being the central characters of father and son played by Charlton Heston and Edward Albert - all other major characters are real and of historical importance to the outcome of the conflict.

The movie features an ‘all-star’ American cast, along with the great Toshiro Mifune as Admiral Yamamoto, and despite the brevity of many of the roles, each is performed quite admirably. The settings used have created a totally authentic aspect to the film (eg an actual aircraft carrier was used for much of the carrier-based scenes) and the clever blend of actual US Navy footage and scenes from earlier movies (”30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Tora Tora Tora”) provides most of the action sequences.

I personally prefer seeing such battles depicted as a contest between two equally capable combatants, instead of watching the standard theme of the clever, faultless ‘goodies’ beating the evil, stupid, incompetent ‘baddies’. This is one of the major ‘plusses’ of the movie.

THE EXTRAS

Quite extensive, and in a number of transfer formats:

1 The Making of Midway - a 39-minute documentary that in the most part is quite satisfactory and rewarding. Some commentary on scenes that didn’t appear in (this version of?) the film (see Additional scenes below). Explanations are given for the addition of certain contentious scenes and the depiction of the Japanese.

2 The Sound of Midway - a 4-minute promotion and explanation of ’sensurround’.

3 The Score of Midway - a 6-minute doco on John Williams and the music for this movie.

4 “They Were There” - a strange 6-minute featurette where three Midway veterans eventually get a chance to recount their experiences ‘in ten words or less’. Mainly an extended trailer. The one redeeming feature of this segment was the revelation that these people’s personal experiences were recounted as important parts of the storyline.

5 Photograph montage - to me, a typically uninspiring segment of 3-minutes duration. At least it was self-scrolling and had background music.

6 Additional scenes - a 10-odd minutes segemnt with 5 or six scenes either deleted from this version or altered. All of the scenes contained Heston’s ‘love interest’ who I didn’t see at all during viewing.

7 Theatrical trailer - 2?-minutes

Of the above, I rate the documentary quite highly, with the others generally passable.

CONCLUSION

This is a rather impressive depiction of the Battle of Midway which occurred in June 1942 - the next major naval confrontation between the USA and Japan following the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941.

The story is told from both angles in quite some detail. I personally prefer seeing such battles depicted as a contest between two equally capable combatants, instead of watching the standard theme of the clever, faultless ‘goodies’ beating the evil, stupid, incompetent ‘baddies’. This is one of the major ‘plusses’ of the movie.