I've seen the old Midway movie with Charleton Heston, Henry Fonda, Glen Ford et al a number of times and enjoy it each time.

This afternoon I settled down to watch the new version of Midway with a cast of people I never heard of before.

The very beginning was alright but the attack on Pearl Harbor was so fake and computer graphiced that I turned it off.  The Japanese aircraft knife edging through closely moored ships strafing and dropping bombs through the flames was dramatic but was not believable.  It was too much like a Star Wars episode.  Perhaps they cleaned it to be more believable later but I turned it off.  Perhaps to today's generation brought up on this stuff thought it was real.

At Pearl Harbor the ships were torpedoed or dive bombed.   I imagine strafing was also done...at the airfields like Ford Island and Hickam field and perhaps at the ships from a further distance.  But not right on their decks weaving in and out between the superstructures of ships so closely moored together.  And the tracers looked like they were put in there as afterthoughts. 

I'll stick to the old believable movies made before the computer whiz kids came to Hollywood.

Noel

Edited January 23, 20224 yr by birdguy

If you're keen on military history, it can often get in the way of enjoying movies. The nonsense that some filmmakers put in, and the reason is usually to make it "more dramatic".

• Ancient & medieval battles where someone somersaults over the front enemy rank, and is promptly skewered on the ground by someone in the second rank but hey, at least it looked impressive. For a second or two...
• Ancient & medieval armies running at each other and dong a big confused merge after which all combatants are paired off like dancing partners. More nonsense.
• Black powder /horse and musket battles where every clash is ultimately decided with the bayonet, when in fact this was quite rare.
• "Gettysburg" with its intrusive musical score. (Not dramatic enough without it, you see. If only Pickett had known...)
• Cavalry charges where everyone goes at the gallop from the start.
• WW2 movies where the combatants leave cover and go at each other hand to hand in open ground as if firearms had never been invented.
• WW2 movies where the enemy shows as much tactical nous as the sprites in a game of Space Invaders.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Call me old-fashioned, or unschooled in the arts of mass entertainment. but I've never been convinced that masses of men trying to kill each other isn't sufficiently dramatic in and of itself to be worth portraying as it happened.

 

The purpose of a film is to entertain and therefore draw audiences to the box office and relieve them of their money.
Isn't this why the success or failure is always measured by how much money was made?
Today's special effects are usually so good as to look like the real thing, even if the thing is not necessarily historically accurate.
They are certainly much better than the model ships negociating a tank in a studio or Supercar climbing into the sky on a wire,
though they did have a charm of their own.

 

 

I've watched it, it's "ok", but does not seem to be as genuine as the original movie.  It is entertainment based on true stories, but true stories are not fantastic enough for Hollywood, so special effects and artistic license rule the script.

Better to read. Sometimes history is more unbelievable then fiction.

15 hours ago, birdguy said:

Perhaps to today's generation brought up on this stuff thought it was real.

 

I don't think its necessarily because its a "modern movie" just the difference between a well made movie and one that isn't, and/or a movie with a decent budget or a minimal one.

I thought the combat scenes in the Band of Brothers were pretty grim and realistic - I watched it when it was first released, and watched it again recently...

Now I'm intrigued. A $100 million dollar budget makes it the most expensive indie movie to date, according to Wikipedia. Midway is a  compelling story, and I don't think I'd be put off over a few technical details, so I'll give it a shot. I thought the old one was decent, and Tora Tora Tora was better. I remember being disappointed in the last Pearl Harbor movie I saw, which shoehorned a love story into it, I presume to broaden its appeal. ("WWII naval epic" doesn't sound like a date movie.) A Battle of the Coral Sea could make an amazing movie, but I don't think one has ever really been done.Directly on topic, Hollywood seems to be intellectually bankrupt now, but o tempera! o mores!

I recently watched Patton again with George C. Scott. No attempt was made to portray WWII tanks, and that's a bit distracting, but it's still a great movie about the man, and historical with regard to his story. (I'm sure the constant wide-angle shots looked better on the big screen.) On the other hand, there was that tank movie (Fury) with Brad Pitt that did, and it was pretty awful.

As for explosive action: Roland Emmerich. Remember Independence Day? I actually thought that one was sort of fun.

I agree, Band of Brothers was very well done.  So was A Bridge Too Far.

Noel

9 minutes ago, birdguy said:

So was A Bridge Too Far.

I remember seeing A Bridge Too Far at the Ft. Campbell theater. You can imagine the different audience reactions to the 101st and 82nd Airborne scenes :-)

1 hour ago, Tim_Capps said:

I remember seeing A Bridge Too Far at the Ft. Campbell theater. You can imagine the different audience reactions to the 101st and 82nd Airborne scenes 🙂

"They're good soldiers in the 82nd...just keep your hand on your wallet at all times."

- Gen. Taylor (A Bridge Too Far)

😁

On 1/23/2022 at 5:48 PM, birdguy said:

I turned it off. 

I fell asleep as the Battle of Midway was finishing up. It seemed like a special effects movie with some cheezy dialogue and a small amount of personal life stuff thrown in to pad the scenes between explosions. I did enjoy the CGI, for the most part (except when it was just way over the top like the extended Pearl Harbor sequence) but it was very pedestrian. Coral Sea was reduced to a two second shot of a sinking ship and Halsey (I think) saying, "If we had only been here 24 hours earlier." What? Not a very good movie.

When they were filming that last Pearl Harbor I could watch the planes they had brought over from my house.  They were using the Spruance destroyers laid up in West Loch inactive ships as stand-ins.  They had an explosive charge set up on the deck of one of them that ended up damaging the ship.  Those cans all ended up as targets so it didn't really matter in the end.

 

I thought Gettysburg did a pretty good job of showing large-scale infantry battle.  Since it was based on a fiction account you had to kind of accept the premise.  The late Brian Pohanka was a tech advisor and I think he forgot more about Gettysburg than the rest of us would ever know.

 

scott s.

.

 

 

57 minutes ago, scott967 said:

I thought Gettysburg did a pretty good job of showing large-scale infantry battle.  Since it was based on a fiction account you had to kind of accept the premise.  The late Brian Pohanka was a tech advisor and I think he forgot more about Gettysburg than the rest of us would ever know.

I don't think Gettysburg was a bad movie, certainly not like Gods and Generals which was a complete mess. While it had its faults I think Gettysburg is one of the best battle movies that is likely to leave the unknowledgeable viewer with a (basic) idea of how the battle played out and why. A Bridge Too Far scores highly here too. Good luck with getting any understanding of the Ardennes campaign from The Battle of the Bulge...

But apart from the overly-talkiness and Buster Kilrain, the thing that annoys me most about Gettysburg is the musical score, especially during Pickett's charge. It's almost as if the director is grabbing you by the lapel and shouting "See how dramatic this is?"  Sorry Ron, but if you need the music for that, you're doing it wrong.

I've just finished my second reading (actually listening, on Audible) of Allen Guelzo's Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. The narrative goes into almost epic detail, but still holds your attention, and is even amusing in spots e.g. the officer who was received a non-serious but unnerving wound and ran away shouting "I'm dead! I'm dead!"  HIs superior remarked to some nearby musicians/.stretcher bearers. "Go and take that dead man off...if you can catch him."

The story of Dan Sickles and his unauthorised redeployment is almost comedy gold.

"The less Meade saw of Sickles, the happier he was" 

"Not for the first or last time, Dan Sickles heard a 'no' and pretended he had heard a 'yes'."

When Meade asked him "....'General, can you hold this ground?' 'Yes I can,' Sickles lied handsomely."

Also interesting was the story of the Harper's Ferry Cowards, which I'd never heard before.

 

I just saw Hotel Rwanda this evening.  It really moved me.  I've been in two wars but nothing prepared me for that.  If you have seen it tell me what you think of it.

I was 8 years when Pearl Harbor was bombed and we have been at war ever since.  And there have been plenty we weren't involved in (that we know of).  And now we may be on verge f another one.

It seems the louder we shout 'Peace' the closer we get to war.

Maybe those UFOs that people see flying around are galactic guards making sure we never leave our solar system.

Noel