This is an excellent complement to the other new Midway film. It focuses on the danger of being a carrier plane flight crew, including the chance of being lost at sea. (In the also-excellent Japanese animation of the Oct42 carrier Battle of Santa Cruz, a Wildcat fighter pilot has to bail out, and you see him parachuting into the vast Pacific with the implication of little or no chance of ever being found so far from base (Espiritu Santo).
I thought the CGI was very good, and note the Pensacola class heavy cruiser and the USS Atlanta antiaircraft cruiser rendered so faithfully.
All the time spent on the men in the water was excruciating but fair, considering what a lot of aircrew went through. Back in Macomb Illinois, I had a friend named Ben T. Scheik who had been a 21 year old PBY pilot and somehow survived the war. He was a heck of a pilot, a member of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), and I could see Ben wearing a Hawaiian shirt flying his plane. :-)
Everyone should watch Hollywood director John Ford's color Battle of Midway documentary film on YouTube, wherein he focuses on the importance of search and rescue after the battle. To people at that time both in and out of the service, our servicemen's safety and wellbeing was uppermost in their minds.
And the scene in this movie of the submarine surfacing raises the question of whether missing aircrew were picked up by the many Japanese subs north of Midway ... and what might have happened to those aircrew.
I'm not sure Miles Browning should be hammered so hard, though. If he hadn't gotten those planes off early and if we hadn't knocked out 3 of the 4 Japanese carriers, the battle would have gone the other way. Look how effective Hiryu's counterattack (on Yorktown) was, and it was just one of the Japanese carriers.
I would like to see verification of his objection to lighting up Enterprise and Hornet for night-time landings and his disregard of aircrew safety after the first crucial day.
GOOD film, well done.
I thought the CGI was very good, and note the Pensacola class heavy cruiser and the USS Atlanta antiaircraft cruiser rendered so faithfully.
All the time spent on the men in the water was excruciating but fair, considering what a lot of aircrew went through. Back in Macomb Illinois, I had a friend named Ben T. Scheik who had been a 21 year old PBY pilot and somehow survived the war. He was a heck of a pilot, a member of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), and I could see Ben wearing a Hawaiian shirt flying his plane. :-)
Everyone should watch Hollywood director John Ford's color Battle of Midway documentary film on YouTube, wherein he focuses on the importance of search and rescue after the battle. To people at that time both in and out of the service, our servicemen's safety and wellbeing was uppermost in their minds.
And the scene in this movie of the submarine surfacing raises the question of whether missing aircrew were picked up by the many Japanese subs north of Midway ... and what might have happened to those aircrew.
I'm not sure Miles Browning should be hammered so hard, though. If he hadn't gotten those planes off early and if we hadn't knocked out 3 of the 4 Japanese carriers, the battle would have gone the other way. Look how effective Hiryu's counterattack (on Yorktown) was, and it was just one of the Japanese carriers.
I would like to see verification of his objection to lighting up Enterprise and Hornet for night-time landings and his disregard of aircrew safety after the first crucial day.
GOOD film, well done.