New Movie Alert! "Midway", coming November 2019!

Good news! There is a new Second World War film being released on 8 November 2019. It will cover the Battle of Midway and will be staring Woody Harrelson as ADM Chester Nimitz! 100M USD budget, and its a joint production between the US and China. I can't wait for this one. Not since 2001's Pearl Harbor have I been so excited. For almost 20 years I've waited for another truly excellent, Pearl Harbor-quality Second World War film to be released. It'll be great!

*cue angry hollering from OpanaPointer*

Midway (2019) - IMDb

 

Well dang, given I can't watch movies or any form of TV while on my mission, I'll have to add that to my ever growing list of movies I'll have to watch when I get back.

 

Roland Emmerich as director? Yeah, sure, that's just gonna be great. Meanwhile, they seem to have a cast member playing Gay's radioman, but nobody playing Gay.

 

Brandon Sklenar is playing George Gay

 

Maybe I'll get that on pay-per-view.

 

Whoopi Goldberg...She's playing "Whoopi" Cushion.

 

This is sarcasm, right?

 

Today's CG in movies can make the battles look historically "right", as in, no more T-6 Texans dressed up in an attempt to resemble Zero fighters. But what I hope, is that the screenplay also gets it right. No offense meant to the men who were at the sharp end, but the situation was virtually won ahead of time, by the U.S. code-breakers. I would put that part prominently into the movie, since their part was heroic, too. There are real-life documentary clips in existence of action from Midway Island, itself. These show how vulnerable those stationed there were. Thanks to the American carrier aviation, any invasion of the island was soon out of the picture, but meanwhile, the tiny island took a real pasting. This I would show, were I the director. Of course the turning point of battle, is when a U.S. dive bomber leader follows his gut instincts, and then a Jap destroyer, to find the location of the Jap carrier force. It was also lucky timing, that the dive bombers appeared after the U.S. torpedo bombers had already drawn the Jap fighter screen to lower elevation. There is enough real-life drama in this story, that I hope the filmmakers resist the temptation to get too "creative".

P.S. It was also a gutsy call, to actually trust the U.S. code-breakers intelligence find, and position all the U.S. assets in place near Midway. This was the most important decision Nimitz would make in WWII, and it probably shortened the Pacific War by at least a year.

 

It’s like making a film about a mid-season football game instead of the championship, and for a second time. Midway was not decisive. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was larger and more significant.

Wiki cites the budget for Midway at less than $60 million, which by today’s standards won’t go far unless the cast and crew are working for low wages. Dunkirk had a quoted budget of $100-150 million and was directed by the best in the business, but the staged battle scenes and special effects were underwhelming.

 

Well, the lack of CGI was an conscious effort on his part, as he wanted to use as little as possible.

 

Which came back to bite him in the bum, he failed to show the sheer scale of the evacuation, he made it seem like the BEF was missing the vacation boat, not on the brink of total destruction.

 

I disagree. Depending on what you mean by "decisive" Midway may or may not be. It did pretty much take the Japanese capability to wage an offensive away. It was really all over by the time of Leyte. That was simply the death ride of the IJN. Massive battle but not going to have much impact no matter what as far as the overall war was concerned.

 

I also have to disagree. Leyte Gulf did not decide anything. If the Japanese fleet had stayed home, the course of the war would have been no different.

Leyte Gulf, and the Philippine Sea before it, were significant because they failed to be decisive for the side that needed a victory to turn the tide. American superiority by then was so great that our operations went forward unimpeded by the best efforts of the IJN.

It's rare for one battle to literally decide a war, but Midway is as close as it gets. The Japanese were thrown from the dominant, offensive position to the defensive, reactive one.

Midway also represented a fundamental change in naval combat. A fleet of over one hundred warships was defeated by the destruction of just four of them.

 

Very true. Without codebreaking, there was absolutely no reason for every available American carrier to be in the exact right place to deal a decisive blow.

The Japanese expected us to be responding after they had executed their attack and landing on Midway, essentially the position the Japanese were in in the Marianas and Leyte Gulf; and without codebreaking, that would have been the situation.

 

Midway was decisive as well due to it's impact on the Guadalcanal Campaign which kicked off two months later. That campaign was so close fought, that those four extra carriers and their aircrews undoubtedly would have proved decisive. When the Hornet was sunk at Santa Cruz in October, a badly damaged Enterprise was the only operational US fleet carrier left in the Pacific. The number of ways the four carriers might have been used to change the course of the battle for Guadalcanal are too numerous to list and most would have been bad for the allies.