Midway the Movie

midway was a really bad movie,period.bad story line.bad stock footage usage(heston flaming a panther is only 1 example).recycled some Tora,Tora ,Tora footage that all fans of TTT recognized immediately and added to dislike of midway.laughable chatter on various Japanese ships and their bridges or CIC equilavent etc.etc.etc. it was a real let down for me but hey,Thats only me!if ya like it,more power to ya! (we cant all be right,Right?)

IMDB link for “Flags of Our Fathers” – Spielberg gets a credit as executive producer:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418689/

That’s right. Stephen Spielberg’s “The Pacific War” will have an episode recreating the Battle of Midway. A number of other key batteles are scheduled to also be covered.

This from this site – (I posted this link a few months ago too).
http://www.upcomingepics.com/pacific_war/index.shtml

What battles/campaigns will be featured?

Episode 1: Pearl Harbor – late May 1942
Episode 2: Midway
Episode 3: Guadalcanal
Episode 4: Guadalcanal
Episode 5: ?
Episode 6: ?
Episode 7: ?
Episode 8: ?
Episode 9: Hiroshima?

I can’t wait…

Same here….searches through the internet turned up zilch…anyone got a good link or lead to any info on this?

M

I’d like to hear more as well…

I did some quick checking on the ‘net and all I could find (Speilberg-wise) was the “Band of Brothers” follow-on “The Pacific War”, a mini about , well, the Pacific war… and “Flags of Our fathers”, his take on Iwo Jima. Is the upcoming film mentioned above one of these perhaps?

enquiring minds want to know

gregv

Ok…whoa…back up….how come this is the first I’ve heard of this NEW Battle of Midway production by Spielberg/Hanks? Whycome this has’nt been mentioned in all of our discussions of aviation movies before this? Details, man, details!! Let’s hear more! This is phenomenal news to me!!

Yes, the footage of a large flying boat being shot down and crashing at sea is in the old version of Midway…as I recall, it was taken out by Mustangs, but in the film you just see two planes zooming up as the plane impacts the sea, you can’t tell what they are….and the C-130 footage I mention is of such dubious quality that you have to really strain to see what it is (filling in for a Japanese Emily or Mavis recon plane) and it is only for a few seconds…Truth be told, this movie has had so much added and taken away from it over the years (my DVD version has NO Coral Sea battle footage in it, but I recall seeing that version of it on TV) that it is hard to tell what the original version actually contained! The producers got ahold of $60,000 worth of archival footage for this movie to use in it, the studio balked at the price, and the producers showed them what they wanted to use and then asked them how much they thought it would cost to RE-CREATE what was in the archival footage in modern day 1976….the studio suddenly agreed that $60,000 was’nt such a bad price!! And yes, a WHOLE LOT of ‘Tora Tora Tora’s’ attack scenes were used in the movie, but to what I think is rather good effect….never heard that the original TTT producers were dissappointed to see parts of their film rehashed.
Now…what’s all this about a new Midway film?

Mark

At least Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks should hopefully make a better and more accurate account in their upcoming version of the Battle of Midway.

BWT: I understand that a local collector/film supplier of military vehicles has sent a load over to Hawaii for a S.S. film…But I don’t know what it’s about..Midway or whatever.

…I guess I have good memories of this movie because I first saw it on my birthday in 1976 when I turned 12 at a theatre that was set up for the new movie sensation, ‘Sensurround’, comprising a bunch of well hidden speakers that would shake the whole theatre when a bomb went off…Mark

I was 13 when this movie came out, and I made my father take me to see it on the first day. Like the “sensurround” movies before it; Earthquake, Towering Inferno, and Hindenburg, it made me dream of a larger world.

Maybe, like BOB, it’s not the most accurate movie in the world, but it certainly does a good job of making the audience feel a part of the story.

I haven’t seen this film for many years but I remember I was a little disappointed after Tora Tora Tora. I don’t recall seeing a Herc in it, or a Panther. I must have switched off by then.

I do know that the makers (director and many crew) of Tora Tora Tora were very unhappy that their film stock had been used by the makers of Midway.

I seem to recall a lot of real footage being spliced in wasn’t there? Including a brilliant long piece of gun camera footage of a Jap flying boat being chased and shot at just above the water – vague memory here. May have been a different film.

At least Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks should hopefully make a better and more accurate account in their upcoming version of the Battle of Midway.

I was greatly amused by Heston crashing a F9F Panther.

But what the heck, if it teaches a bit of history, to those who otherwise wouldn’t know it, I’m willing to put up with some nonsense…like the Memphis Belle remake.
Let us “aviation history experts” put our anorak mode in neutral for awhile. 🙂

BTW: The actual pilot of plane caught on film survived.

Hi Mark,

Yes it did an alright job to try to follow the Midway action, I’m glas that the rerelease Dvd version has the deleted scene that where shot for TV and never for the big screen put back into the movie.

For those who say it on Tv the who;e section on Coral Sea with the 130 filling in as a Maya was cut from the VHS versions.

Also to note that some of the Midway stuff was shot at 69 Palms train facilty.

Cheers
RER