Knurled. said:Old_Town said:I'm waiting patiently for the Part 2 of the Montemayor YouTube video on Midway... His video and detail on Pearl Harbor and Coral Sea are very well done.
You too?
I saw Part 1 the day it came out as a recommended video, never having seen his channel before.
A month later, realized his channel was not the type to update every week.
But it's been 6 months since that came out. So i recently watched the Coral Sea battle video. Really interesting.
wae said:The next problem is that they had to squeeze in the Doolittle Raiders, because that's part of why the Japanese felt they needed to launch their attack, but they spent way too much time on it. I can only surmise it is because of all the Chinese money that was poured into the film. I have a sub-rant about how having a movie about American military history being made with Chinese money being analogous to Harbor Freight putting out a Veteran's Day coupon for their Chinese-made American flags, but that's a different show.
That is interesting about the money, especially given that the US was allied with and pouring money like a firehose at Chiang Kai-shek, who was to current China as Robert E. Lee is to the current US. (And a decent part of why Japan had a beef with the US - we were aiding their enemy in various ways, culminating in an embargo on trade with Japan immediately before their bombers paid Hawaii a visit)
I suspect it has a lot more to do with anything that makes Japan looks bad.
The US sending money to an anti-commie is probably not considered favorably, but massive amounts of raping and killing of civilians likely carries a bit more weight and sticks in memory a bit longer.
In reply to aircooled :
I remember an old article in Nintendo Power magazine (which should tell you how old it is...) about the game "Midway", which was made by a Japanese company, about one of Japan's worst (if not THE worst) single-battle military defeats in history... and it was being told from the US point of view.
This and other things are why I am fascinated by the video alluded to before, where the battle of Midway is presented strictly from the Japanese point of view as far as intelligence and military decisions are concerned, and Tora! Tora! Tora!, which was kinda told from both sides of the battle, even so far as having two completely separate units.
I mean, yeah, I'm an American, I know how things played out, my frickin' GRANDPARENTS were barely in their 20s when it all happened (and my mom's dad served on a floating target, err destroyer, in the Pacific...) but history is a story with many facets, and a key to understanding it is to view all facets of what is going on.
Which is why I point out that Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor was understandable. Utterly reckless, in that they were under the impression that the US would accept being smacked down and meekly sit in the corner, but they had their reasons. And then when the US stepped up instead, they were hoping for a blitzkrieg type of naval confrontation because they knew they could not fight a sustained war without access to resources like oil, which we'd denied them in 1941.
Really, if the series of incredible dumb luck that led up to the way Midway panned out in the US's favor hadn't happened, the war would have been completely different. Midway as a battle is utterly fascinating.
I finally saw this. It's on HBO now, thus the revival of this old thread. My general impression is a mixed OK. Historically, it hits a lot of correct facts / realities. On a downside to that, it covers a lot of ground, and because of that makes only short work of some things (e.g. the battle of Coral Sea is literally a shot of a carrier sinking).
Only a little bit of character development / character threading. Probably not enough for most Hollywood movies. Acting is generally fine though.
SFX are good to marginal. Good in isolation (e.g. plane flying in open sky), marginal in close ups of ships / battles.
Generally a good overview historically, if not rushed a bit. The BIG fail is in the specifics, most especially any action. All action (mostly planes and ships) is WILDLY over done historically. All planes seem to do everything at 50 feet of the ground within a few feet of each other. I understand they are trying to get as much action as visible as possible and trying to make things as exciting as possible, but it's pretty silly. Sound is also (realistically) pretty bad (e.g. dive bombing sequence has equal levels on engine sound, sound of AA firing, shells exploding, crew talking, and no wind noise)
I did catch a shot of a Kate (torpedo bomber), glide bombing a torpedo over the rear (from the rear) of a anchored battle ship and releasing the torpedo about 20 feet above the deck of the ship... uhm....
There is strangely a complete lack of Val dive bombers (Japanese) and Wildcats (American fighter) in the movie from what I could see! I guess they didn't want to build / pay for the models. A very clear lack of understanding of aerodynamics in many cases (e.g. plane looses 3/4 of wind and does casual roll...), a bazaar depiction of engine out landings on carrier that involved diving below the hight of the deck the popping up at the last second to land (!?!?), a Dauntless with WAY more power then it actually has....
Conclusion. If you have any historical interest, worth a watch and you can later research some the presented stuff more completely. As noted, what is presented is generally rather accurate, it just may not have been known (or by the person knowing it / expressing it) at the point they show it.
NickD said:aircooled said:NickD said:... I'm curious if it gives any coverage to the poor bastards who flew Devastators pretty much knowing that they weren't coming back.
It pretty much HAS to. That IS a critical aspect of the pivital part of the whole battle!!!!
(in a previous post, someone posted a picture of a Devastator fusalage mock up they used to shoot close ups of the crews)
Never underestimate Hollywood's ability to screw up history.
Hollywood? Have you ever heard of Shanghai Ruyi Entertainment? Neither have I, there's also very limited information on them out there other than they were a production company for this movie (RuYi Media) and likely provided much of the funding for this project. It also likely explains the sporadic Doolittle Raider bits in the movie.
It does show Torpedo 8 getting wasted but it is a pretty abbreviated (like most of the movie). It does not make it clear though that the zero where at altitude and got drawn down by them. There is a comment (as noted, how the movie explains some things) from a Japanese commander on how the fighters need to "stop glory hunting" and get back to covering the fleet.
I am not sure where they got "glory hunting" as it doesn't really fit into the importance of what was going on (they dove down to protect the ship and where caught at low altitude when the Dauntless squadrons arrived). I suspect this may be the result of the Chinese financing (which is most assuredly at the will of the central government) though and making the Japanese looks as bad as possible (they were low because they so much valued "glory" over the protection of the fleet).
There is not to much for the Japanese, in real life, to be proud of in anything depicted in this movie. There is little need to make anything up. Probably why it was easy to get the Chinese to finance it.
There is also a scene of the Japanese (at very low altitude of course) bombing civilians as retaliation for protecting the Doolittle raiders (all very rushed). This may be inspired by the financing, but is also VERY much inline with what the Japanese did (maybe not specifically) and in reality and also VERY much underplays their revenge (you may have heard of the Rape of Nancheng):
...“They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved, They raped any woman from the ages of 10 – 65, and before burning the town they thoroughly looted it.”
He continued, writing in his unpublished memoir, “None of the humans shot were buried either, but were left to lay on the ground to rot, along with the hogs and cows.”
The Japanese marched into the walled city of Nancheng at dawn on the morning of June 11, beginning a reign of terror so horrendous that missionaries would later dub it “the Rape of Nancheng.” Soldiers rounded up 800 women and herded them into a storehouse outside the east gate. “For one month the Japanese remained in Nancheng, roaming the rubble-filled streets in loin clothes much of the time, drunk a good part of the time and always on the lookout for women,” wrote the Reverend Frederick McGuire. “The women and children who did not escape from Nancheng will long remember the Japanese—the women and girls because they were raped time after time by Japan’s imperial troops and are now ravaged by venereal disease, the children because they mourn their fathers who were slain in cold blood for the sake of the ‘new order’ in East Asia.”...
...Those discovered to have helped the Doolittle raiders were tortured. In Nancheng, soldiers forced a group of men who had fed the airmen to eat feces before lining up ten of them for a “bullet contest” to see how many people a single bullet would pass through before it stopped. In Ihwang, Ma Eng-lin, who had welcomed injured pilot Harold Watson into his home, was wrapped in a blanket, tied to a chair and soaked in kerosene. Then soldiers forced his wife to torch him...
So.... you can kind of understand the attitude the Chinese have for the Japanese (although none of those people are alive now).
There is a lot more in that article, including some info on Unit 731, which was really inline with some of the worst of what the Nazi's did.
In reply to Old_Town :
How can you decry a movie Where Americans are the underdogs and conclusively win a battle that changes the whole course of the war?
That was the last time Japan had superior numbers and America was the underdog. Where Japan failed because they followed proven doctrine and America won because we were smarter and more clever. ( not to mention had better timing due to luck).
Was it as good as the original? No. Better in some ways. It gave a more realistic view of what a pilot sees in a dive bomb, but didn't exactly copy the reported attack directions.
Midway is a fascinating battle.
Neither Midway movie is very good.
Original Poster here - So, I did see it in the theater and... it was not as bad as I expected (Set the bar low, and you will never be disappointed!). As others have said, they crammed in years of fascinating milestones to lead up to the pivotal battle with some Hollywood cheese and liberties but I'm just glad they didn't add a love-interest sub-plot.
I did like the recent Greyhound movie much more though...
You'll need to log in to post.
