Midway

“To limit the narrative of World War II to a white, straight, American male perspective willfully skews history.”

Title: Midway (2019)
Director: Roland Emmerich 👨🏼🇩🇪🏳️‍🌈
Writer: Wes Tooke 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Dana 👩🏼🇺🇸♿

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.

Technical: 1.5/5

World War II stories fascinate me. The complexities, the geopolitical intrigue, the cloak-and-dagger spycraft, the gnawing ethical conundrums—all are components of a puzzle that can never be fully pieced together, never fully completed.

Midway, for its part, feels more like a word jumble on the back of a sugary cereal box than insight into one of the less-covered battles of the war. Everything is too big—big explosions, big plumes of smoke, big flames—but devoid of real substance. Without a compelling narrative thread running through the near-constant action scenes, the experience feels empty. There’s no real story or compelling heroes or villains in which to invest.

The ostensible protagonist, Dick Best (Ed Skrein), comes across as a hastily-scribbled character description overshadowed by his horrendous accent. The London-born actor’s attempt at a New Jersey accent sounds more like a Mississippi drawl crossed with the Bostonian allergy to the letter “R,” with a healthy dose of Philadelphia thrown in just for kicks. Without a backstory to necessitate an accent, the butchered words just serve to drain even more authenticity from an experience that plays like a combination of halfhearted roleplay and someone’s deranged need to drive up the CGI budget.

Midway doesn’t want to give its viewers a history lesson about a hard-won fight or put them in the shoes of someone else. It’s really only interested in gunfire and crashes.

Gender: 1/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Even for the macho, male-dominated war genre, Midway offers only the barest glimpse of the war at home. Mandy Moore as Dick’s wife Ann has so little to do and such a shallow role that the decision to cast a famous face seems baffling. A relative unknown would have carried the role just as well and undoubtedly cost the studio less. For movies like Midway, the Bechdel Test doesn’t fully encapsulate just how little interest there is in offering a female perspective—for that, we have to turn to the Mako Mori Test.

The Mako Mori Test was originally proposed during another action-packed, special-effects-heavy film, Pacific Rim (2013). It evaluates whether a story includes at least one woman with her own narrative arc “that isn’t about supporting a man’s story.” A film that contains a superficial exchange between two women might pass the Bechdel Test, but would still fall flat when evaluated on the criteria of the Mako Mori Test. In any event, Midway fails both miserably.

In addition to excluding women from the narrative of the plot, Midway adds insult to injury by excluding women from the historical narrative of WWII. In depicting the strategic aspects of the Battle of Midway, we see Layton (Evans) champion the team of codebreakers working under Joseph Rochefort (Brennan Brown). In contrast to the theory that Washington’s top brass have adopted, the codebreakers’ painstaking work has led them to determine that the Japanese fleet planned to attack Midway. The intelligence and the trust that Layton and Admiral Nimitz (Woody Harrelson, sporting a distracting wig) placed in them, is essential to the victory at Midway. The movie version takes the time to acknowledge how vital the work wound up being, but leaves out a key fact: It was a woman named Agnes Meyer Driscoll who was largely responsible for breaking the Japanese codes, and who taught Rochefort most of what he knew.

Race: 1.5/5

While Midway unquestionably comes at the war from an American perspective, focusing on American heroes—that is, white, male American heroes—the film gives a few moments of humanity to the Japanese soldiers fighting on the opposite side. One of the most touching scenes comes as the battle ends and the Japanese fleet’s last aircraft carrier in the fight is deemed unsalvageable. Opting to destroy the ship rather than allow the technology to fall into Allied hands, the commander of the division, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi (Tadanobu Asano), declares to his men as they evacuate that he will go down with the ship. The ship’s captain, Tomeo Kaku (Nobuya Shimamoto), requests permission to join him. Their sacrifice and dedication stands in contrast to the intransigence and refusal to accept that their strategy might be flawed, displayed earlier particularly by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa), who oversaw the Japanese Imperial Navy.

At the same time, the heavy-handed contrast between Yamamoto’s refusal to change course and the Americans’ ability to adapt smacks of a racialized stereotype, blaming the Japanese defeat on a misguided sense of honor. In drawing this portrait of Yamamoto and the Japanese fleet as honor-bound, Midway falls into a common trend in American media. This oversimplified view of Japanese honor—in essence, a CliffNotes version of the bushido code of the samurai—is ultimately little more than a reductive stereotype.

In that same vein, Midway paints Japanese pilots as kamikaze caricatures, screaming in primal fashion as their planes descend. The image of the battle-crazed, animalistic Japanese pilot is yet another offensive and overused trope of WWII films, one with little to no historical accuracy. Such depictions reinforce the image of Japanese military forces in WWII as killing machines, soldiers focused solely on inflicting maximum damage—a false narrative that makes it far easier to accept the notion that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan was necessary to save American lives. In justifying his decision to authorize the only use of nuclear weapons in combat in history, Truman used blatantly racist terms: “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them,” he said of the Japanese. “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”

Mediaversity Grade: F 1.33/5

World War II encompasses a wealth of stories and intrigue, individuals and historical figures of nearly every race, religion, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation imaginable. To limit the narrative to a white, straight, American male perspective willfully skews history—not simply by sticking to the story of the victors, but by giving a false impression of who those victors really were.

War comes with devastating costs not just for those hailed as heroes and martyrs when the day is done, but for those who bear the burden of its fallout. The image of the second world war remains one of young white men who bravely volunteered to serve—precisely the type after which Captain America was modeled—and glosses over the experiences of women, people of color, and those deemed not to be in fighting form. Wartime breeds virulent strains of patriotism that merge into xenophobia in the blink of an eye; so long as strapping young lads in their fighter planes seem righteous as they strike Japanese targets, there seems to be no need to discuss the darker aspects of anti-Asian sentiments that led to the internment of 120,000 Americans who happened to share ancestry with the people deemed an “enemy.” Movies like Midway, that present only half the picture and frame non-white skin as suspect, give subtle cover to the hatred that still lingers in the white American psyche more than seventy years on.

Like Midway? Try these other WWII-era films.

Grade: FLiNovember 8, 2019