Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9549 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-05-02
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Russian, Italian, French, Danish, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, German, Dutch, Finnish, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish, Norwegian, English, Hebrew
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 128 minutes

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
Originally titled 'Midway', this World War II drama chronicles the great naval battle of Midway in the South Pacific, where the U.S. Navy won an astounding victory.

Customer Reviews

Battle of Mediocrity
Made by the same studio that gave us Tora Tora Tora, I was really looking forward to this film. Whilst TTT was both historically accurate & excellently acted, this one is exactly the opposite. It is truly,absolutely dreadful !!! The acting is uniformly wooden and the dialogue is cringeworthy. You can tell this movie was made "on the cheap" because EVERY action scene is made up from a combination of old World War II footage and at least 45 minutes of Tora Tora Tora. So-much-so that scenes of Japanese torpedo bombers attacking the American carriers ,supposedly 125 miles off Midway, show the Pearl Harbour dockyard cranes in the background. Using stock footage,certainly saves money but badly detracts from reality. Pilots take off in Wildcats which, randomly, turn into Hellcats during flight and SBD Dauntless dive bombers turn into Helldivers then Avengers then Corsairs (and back) again apparently at random. In a ludicrous finale they even manage to add stock footage of an F9F Panther jet in a deck crash landing scene.I only rated this one star, as I was not allowed to give it less.

A five star turkey
Anyone coming to this film having enjoyed Tora, Tora, Tora will be gravely disappointed. Despite it's 'all-star' cast, the acting is uniformly wooden, with a leaden main plot and a truly ghastly sub-plot revolving around a pilot's girlfriend.

At the same time, in contrast to Tora, Tora, Tora, the Japanese are portrayed in a very one dimensional and stereotyped way, which owes more to 'central casting' than reality.

Even the action sequences fall flat, with a shaky mishmash of scenes spliced together; even the better-informed ten year old could pick holes in them.

In fact it could almost be watched as a comedy - but not quite.

A cut-and-paste epic
Midway is very much from the last-gasp of big-screen spot-the-star epics, and it shows. On paper it's an impressive cast - Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, Toshiro Mifune, James Shigeta - but aside from Heston, Fonda and Hal Holbrook, few of them have much to do: Mitchum only has one scene. Much of the first third of the film is taken up with either gathering intelligence while Heston tries not very hard to get estranged son Edward Albert's Japanese-American wife out of internment (this section was even longer, with a subplot with Heston's wife removed from all but the US TV prints: parts of it can be found in this disc's deleted scenes).

Things don't improve much when battle is finally joined and it becomes clear that aside from the odd scene on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the new footage is mainly men in control rooms or cockpits intercut less than convincingly with stock footage from Tora! Tora! Tora! and real color footage of the battle. Unfortunately, blown up to widescreen they often look jarringly grainy, constantly drawing attention to how much of a cut-and-paste the film is. In many ways, despite the widescreen and Senssurround trappings of its theatrical release, this 1976 film often looks like something you'd have expected to be made during the war or perhaps something that started life as an intended TV miniseries: watchable enough without ever really threatening to become truly memorable.

Despite this, it was still surprisingly commercially successful at the US box-office - but then, unlike Tora! Tora! Tora!, the good guys won this particular battle. The DVD is of the two hour theatrical version, but comes loaded with plenty of additional features - 4 deleted scenes and extended ending, a 38-minute making of documentary, featurettes on John Williams' score and the sound effects, the original ten-minute making of short from 1976, stills montage and trailer.