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Author Topic: Midway movie  (Read 4590 times)

Ric Gillespie

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Midway movie
« on: November 14, 2019, 09:37:02 AM »

Someday, someone will make a good airplane movie using CGI (computer-generated imagery), but Midway ain't it.  The airplanes in Midway look great but the battle scenes are cartoons.  At Pearl Harbor, Zeros, who should be at altitude protecting the Kates doing high level bombing and Val dive-bombers, are zinging ridiculously between battleships and strafing, which somehow causes huge explosions.  When SBDs from Enterprise attack Japanese installations on Taroa in the Marshall Islands, we're treated to dramatic chases through jungled mountains.  Taroa, like all of the Marshalls, is a flat-as-a-pancake coral atoll.  At the battle of Midway, SBDs push over for their dive-bombing attacks from what looks like about 5,000 ft (actually, it was 20,000 ft) and take forever to reach bomb release altitude (1,300 ft). 
A dead-stick, no flaps landing on a carrier might be possible, but not with the crazy technique shown in the film.
Some mistakes are just sloppy.  Before the battle, a flight of SBDs arriving from Pearl to land aboard Enterprise are clearly armed with torpedos (landing with a torpedo in place was out of the question).  And so on.
After enough obvious errors you stop believing anything in the film you don't already know.
CGI gives film-makers almost unlimited power to recreate great moments in aviation history.  I'm still waiting for somebody to get it right.

End of rant.
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Bill Mangus

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Re: Midway movie
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2019, 11:03:11 AM »

I have not seen the movie and after Ric's rant I'm not sure I want to :)

Anyway, the best book I've read about Midway (and the one the movie should have been made from? is Never Call Me A Hero by N. Jack "Dusty" Kleiss, Capt, USN Ret. (Harper/Collins, 2017)

Then Lt Kleiss is the only pilot from either side to hit three different ships, all of which sank.  The morning of 4 June he struck the Kaga.  That same afternoon he flew a second mission and hit the Hiryu.  Two days later he hit the cruiser Mikuma.  The high quality black/white pictures included are alone worth the cost of the book.  I got it from Amazon.  Fantastic first-person story. 

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Don White

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Re: Midway movie
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2019, 08:21:56 PM »

Back in the day (which day depends on how far back you want to go) they had to actually operate the various airplanes, trains, cars etc in real time in order to film them. This was often dangerous and indeed killed people (Paul Mantz among them) so it is understandable that for this reason, as well as cost, CGI now dominates. But it did make for some splendid movies.

LTM,
Don
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