I enjoyed this week’s top movie at the box office, Midway. Fortunately, in this case (because I think advance knowledge enhances, rather than diminishes, the cinematic experience), I didn’t know much about this movie in advance.
When I saw that Midway is directed by Roland Emmerich, a German-born moviemaker whose Godzilla (1998), Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow are among the most bombastic movies I’ve seen, I felt a cringe, though because I’d forgotten his forgettable films, I didn’t credit the cause. When I realized who he is, and learned that he also directed the unnecessarily bloody martyr-themed The Patriot, I cringed again. And, frankly, Midway begins as a loud, mammoth-scale behemoth that vibrates and shudders the audience in their seats.
Except for a few significant problems, Midway gets better fast and becomes an absorbing, old-fashioned American war movie. With one crucial omission, each plot point in the structure is properly planned, earned and executed, starting with the Japanese sneak attack on America (Japan initiated the use of force against America at Pearl Harbor, slaughtering thousands of Americans).
An innocent young American atheist or secularist sailor questioning a church service in progress on the deck of the USS Arizona swiftly finds himself fighting for life with his superior while “the Japs” (as the enemy were called in World War 2, a fact which is not treated with apology) bomb and gun down Americans everywhere in Honolulu. It’s a massacre.
This is the predicate for President Roosevelt’s stirring speech to rally the young nation to war, which some believe there’s evidence he knew about in advance. Then, comes a good exposition, which is extremely rare in Hollywood, with a string of leading male characters as top Naval brass, pilots and sailors, wives and Japanese sailors.
The timeline moves steadily and not too fast. This means that, for the first time in a major Hollywood movie in decades, the men who fought the war, who, appropriately for the picture’s Veterans Day weekend release, are both based on real sailors, pilots and officers and portrayed largely without historical revisionism, come off as real, developed, admirable characters. Midway in this sense puts the audience on the edge of their seats. Everyone in the theater, including those I suspect are real American vets, pilots, soldiers and sailors and their children and wives, was very invested in the characters and story.
The battle of Midway cannot be overestimated in turning the war in the Pacific toward the Americans and Midway depicts this hard-fought, deadly, epic battle with top production values. It doesn’t look fake like the Marvel movies. It looks more realistic. Whether Nimitz (Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards…) is ruminating about enemy movements at sea, musicians are pressed into service as codebreakers listening to Zenith radios or the only intelligence officer (Patrick Wilson, Angels in America) to forewarn about the Japs’ attack is nearly wrecked with tension and anxiety about the accuracy of his projections, Midway always keeps the action rooted in the drama of men’s lives at stake.
Screenwriter Wes Tooke gets certain details, such as America’s minisule and poorly prepared and equipped navy right. By the time the battle gets underway, with toe-tingling dive bombing and dogfighting and impossible aeronautic climbs defying the Navy pilots’ biological needs, every character, from Bruno the aircraft carrier crewman (Nick Jonas) to an arrogant American named Best (Ed Skrein, Deadpool) and Mrs. Best (Mandy Moore, This Is Us), is fully enlisted in the dramatic action. Look for Dennis Quaid (A Dog’s Purpose) as an aircraft carrier commander who makes a pivotal judgment, Darren Criss (The Assassination of Gianni Versace) as a pilot and Etsushi Toyokawa as Yamamoto (who said after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that Imperial Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant”). Others include Luke Evans as a naval leader and others you may recognize as tailgunners, war widows and coders. Aaron Eckhart (Sully) appears as Jimmy Doolittle, who dared to bomb Tokyo when America desperately needed him to bomb Japan and ran out of fuel with his crewmen, crashed in enemy territory and tried to escape the bastards. Midway is an American epic that accounts for almost every important aspect of the Pacific theater.
Unfortunately, there are exceptions. While this may be Roland Emmerich’s best movie since Stargate (1994) and he does capture the sense of shock that the Japanese experienced at the depth and magnitude of American resilience and resolve, the director and writer fail to mention or refer to Douglas MacArthur, which strikes me as a key oversight. Worse, they evade the central, driving tenet of Japan’s dominant religion, Shintoism: self-sacrifice. A single scene of a kamikaze diving into an American ship is matched by an American pilot doing the same to a Japanese ship and a scene actually suggests that the Japanese war command discouraged sacrifice.
The opposite is true. The whole country, culture and deeply held belief system of Japan, down to every man, woman and child, was the total moral duty to sacrifice for the sake of one’s race, religion and state; with the emperor and empire being both state and religion. Also, the movie’s apparently been made with assistance from some shell branch of Communist China, so scenes in Japanese-occupied China emphasize Chinese suffering to the detriment of the Doolittle raid subplot.
Midway does, however, depict Japan’s barbarism which is absolutely crucial to any movie about World War 2’s Pacific theater. Also, the conflict between Japanese duty versus American desire to live is made clear. Though I would not have dedicated a war-themed movie to those who fought and died from both countries, some, especially Americans who fought, might see this as a magnanimous gesture.
In any case, Midway earns its excitement and does mostly right by the brave Americans who broke the code, planned, out-thought, outfought and crushed the enemy against all reasonable expectations and those who loved them. The best performances belong to Skrein as Best, Wilson, black-haired Moore struggling to remain as brave and composed as her husband, Quaid, Criss and, Nick Jonas in an important role showing that he’s a natural actor.
Everyone on cast and crew does good work on Midway, however. It’s a thrilling, intense two hours about the victory that stopped Japan from bombing California and invading the United States — the empire had devised plans to march to Chicago — buying America time to crush the enemy without equivocation and win the war. Which, thanks to the Americans of Midway, we did.
The Current War, The Director’s Cut, a strange 2017 movie, finally debuted this fall. It had been languishing in the aftermath of the Me, Too movement that annihilated the movie studio that made The Current War.
The newly released movie, produced by an uncredited Harvey Weinstein (The King’s Speech) and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) among many others, features Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water) as George Westinghouse, Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla and Benedict Cumberbatch (War Horse) as Thomas Edison. This should be an amazing movie.
But it isn’t and, after everything but the kitchen sink was hurled at this movie regardless of merit and through no fault of its own, one can only hazard a guess as to why it is not as good as it might have been.
The Current War is not amazing. It’s barely interesting, though it is interesting — how could it not be, given its subject? — and it gets better as it goes along.
Beginning with the sound of winter’s wind as a blindingly white snowstorm engulfs one man in black, depicting a world in white and black in desperate need of color and light, The Current War comes up with a fast and dizzying array of scenes that zip and do not linger. But it becomes clear without proper exposition that Edison in 1880 has arrived “to give light” with a patent application.
Details are hard to make out. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, working with playwright Michael Mitnick’s screenplay, opted for a hurried first half for reasons that remain unclear. The Current War, which essentially depicts electricity competition within a 13-year span when America had the closest the world’s ever known to having a purely capitalist economy — that is, with some statism but without near-total government control of economics, such as anti-trust law, an income tax, Social Security, Medicare, ObamaCare and control of utilities as monopolies — morphs from man to man contest over electrical currents into a more benign account of both mens’ characters. Like The Founder, The Current War can’t decide where it stands on the morality of a capitalist, let alone capitalism.
Ultimately, it sort of apologizes for their supposed excesses and ruthlessness in the subsidiary character Hoult portrays, Nikola Tesla, whose academic presentation to a small gathering at Columbia College on May 20, 1891 marks a turning point. Immigrant Tesla as the eccentric futurist fits Texas native Gomez-Rejon’s and Pittsburgher Mitnick’s theme that capitalists can do good and bad alike, so the notion which emerges is that capitalism represents both the potential for promoting life and hastening death; it could make peace or it could start war.
This undeveloped theme has certain possibilities, largely unrealized here. By the time the film’s climax comes to Chicago for each capitalist’s presentation to the cronies that control the Columbian Exposition of 1893, both men have compromised themselves to a certain degree, though, arguably, Westinghouse comes off as more principled. The best line of this historically based movie, which plays with the lights and probably the facts a bit too much, is when a question is put to Tesla after he proposes a new idea: “Are you serious?” Tesla deadpans: “Almost always.”
The Current War might’ve been grand. Shannon and Cumberbatch are in fine form as always. Hoult is very good as Tesla. There are glimpses of a vision. But it moves too fast, shows too little and emits the quality of one of those non-fiction programs on a cable channel that dramatizes historical reenactments. Diehard fans of Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla and members of the cast and crew may find something here to appreciate and enjoy. But there’s not enough of a driving sense of purpose to power The Current War.
If director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina) wanted to burnish his cinematic credentials and establish himself as a filmmaker capable of making movies with substance, he’s succeeded with Darkest Hour. If, however, Wright, who answered audience questions following the ArcLight Hollywood screening I attended this week (see my notes below), sought to make a great movie, his picture about Prime Minister Winston Churchill falls short.
The problem with Darkest Hour is not its leading actor, Gary Oldman, an outstanding performer in nearly every movie in which he appears. Despite uneven directing and questionable makeup, Oldman (Book of Eli, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Batman Begins, The Professional, JFK) often shines. As his resilient secretary, Lily James (Baby Driver, Cinderella) also stands out. Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) is less fortunate as Mrs. Churchill in an underdeveloped role. The problem with Darkest Hour is its lack of depth. Wright underplays the leader’s greatness and overplays his fallibility, leaving a lighter impression of a heavyweight leader who single-handedly rallied a great Western state to save itself from annihilation.
Churchill’s part of the story barely grazing this year’s Dunkirk is a remarkable tale of courage, grit and mastery of facts, resolve and history. Wright’s emphasis on Churchill’s idiosyncrasies and doubting, as against the confidence, knowledge and principles he used to guide Britain to defeat Nazi Germany, leaves too much that’s essential offscreen and too much of what is not essential on screen.
Close-up shots and scenes of Churchill in doubt, deep thought and consternation, which Wright takes as fundamental to Churchill’s greatest decisions, contrast with the grand scale of his extraordinary call to glory. Of course, it’s legitimate to portray this British prime minister as mired in doubt. But in portraying Churchill’s doubt, and suggesting that how he eased or alleviated it by means of the approval of others, drawing strength from encounters with those some might refer to as commoners, Darkest Hour minimizes the scale and brilliance of the achievements.
Screenwriter Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything) delivers the lines for a clear and coherent case of soaring heroism with realism. The story’s so involving thanks to his script that you can’t stop watching Churchill gallivant with his port, brandy and cigars, citing Cicero and military maps. Oldman depicts with relish Winston Churchill’s eccentricities such as his aversion to the noise of typing keys, his dread of single-spaced copy and his penchant for enunciation and working with young women in his bedroom while naked or half-naked. The stirring words stir — he stresses “buoyancy”, insists that “France must be saved” and plainly asserts that, against Hitler, Britain must reject living in “a slave state”, “wage war” against Germany and that “nothing less than victory will do” “if necessary alone” — while he’s fully self-aware, thanks to his wife.
“Never surrender to servitude and shame,” Oldman’s Churchill says with thunderous conviction.
A man with such forethought, wisdom and rationality needs more than doubt to galvanize an empire to unite against a tyrant and defend itself. Darkest Hour, more than the movie about a similarly inspiring British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, misses the depth. It is not enough to see that Winston Churchill experienced self-doubt as a way toward accomplishing his greatest moments. Portraying how and why he marshaled optimism and put it toward putting down doubts would have accounted for moments in full. As such, Darkest Hour ends up being too slight, despite Gary Oldman’s finest efforts, for a proper account of the undaunted British hero. The score by Dario Marianelli (Agora, Atonement, A Long Way Down) accentuates the film at its best.
Director Q & A Notes
Director Joe Wright discussed his film Darkest Hour with one of those fawning press types at the ArcLight Hollywood this week.
The director’s comments explain a lot. Wright said that his commercially and critically panned movie Pan lead to his own self-doubt, from which he gained an appreciation for a historical figure that he said he really didn’t see as having much practical relevance to his own life. He also told a heartbreaking story about the late John Hurt being cast in Darkest Hour as Neville Chamberlain (played by Ronald Pickup). Hurt, Wright told the audience, had been diagnosed with cancer. During the first day of rehearsals, Wright explained, John Hurt (V for Vendetta, Contact) got out of bed, slipped and crushed his hip. Sadly, he was unable to perform thereafter.
Wright also entertained the audience with tales of Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron providing crucial career guidance, Wright’s admiration of movies by Bergman, Fellini, Bertolucci and, for his economy and “precise storytelling”, Hitchcock, and, tellingly, given his preference for playing with scale and characters playing God, Wright’s parents both being puppeteers. He said puppetry gave them as artists a great sense of autonomy. His next project, he said, is a movie adaptation of a novel titled Stoner.
Author’s Note
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When I saw that Midway is directed by Roland Emmerich, a German-born moviemaker whose Godzilla (1998), Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow are among the most bombastic movies I’ve seen, I felt a cringe, though because I’d forgotten his forgettable films, I didn’t credit the cause. When I realized who he is, and learned that he also directed the unnecessarily bloody martyr-themed The Patriot, I cringed again. And, frankly, Midway begins as a loud, mammoth-scale behemoth that vibrates and shudders the audience in their seats.
Screenwriter Wes Tooke gets certain details, such as America’s minisule and poorly prepared and equipped navy right. By the time the battle gets underway, with toe-tingling dive bombing and dogfighting and impossible aeronautic climbs defying the Navy pilots’ biological needs, every character, from Bruno the aircraft carrier crewman (Nick Jonas) to an arrogant American named Best (Ed Skrein, Deadpool) and Mrs. Best (Mandy Moore, This Is Us), is fully enlisted in the dramatic action. Look for Dennis Quaid (A Dog’s Purpose) as an aircraft carrier commander who makes a pivotal judgment, Darren Criss (The Assassination of Gianni Versace) as a pilot and Etsushi Toyokawa as Yamamoto (who said after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that Imperial Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant”). Others include Luke Evans as a naval leader and others you may recognize as tailgunners, war widows and coders. Aaron Eckhart (Sully) appears as Jimmy Doolittle, who dared to bomb Tokyo when America desperately needed him to bomb Japan and ran out of fuel with his crewmen, crashed in enemy territory and tried to escape the bastards. Midway is an American epic that accounts for almost every important aspect of the Pacific theater.
The problem with Darkest Hour is not its leading actor, Gary Oldman, an outstanding performer in nearly every movie in which he appears. Despite uneven directing and questionable makeup, Oldman (