YMMV / Midway (1976)

• Awesome Music: It's John Williams so natch.
• Nightmare Fuel: The up close and personal depiction of a cockpit fire in an F4F Wildcat is much more graphic and realistic than you'd expect for a movie from the mid 70s.
• Spiritual Successor: To Tora! Tora! Tora!, about the attack on Pearl Harbor, which employed a similar bifurcated Japanese/American style and similarly strove for realism. However, the filmmakers learned some lessons from Tora! Tora! Tora! (which was a box-office bomb) by using (a lot) more star power, artistic license with history, delivering the Japanese half of the film in English with Japanese-American actors like James Shigeta (this required dubbing Toshiro Mifune, who played Yamamoto) and adding in a fictional lead character for dramatic effect. Tora! Tora! Tora! was almost a documentary.
• Stock Footage Failure: All over the place. Mitigated somewhat in that casual audiences might miss them, but stick out blatantly to anyone with even a little knowledge of WWII aviation:
  • A crashing SBD Dauntless dive bomber at the end of the film uses what may be the same footage of an FH-1 as in The Hunt for Red October, wherein it was just as out of place as it is here. In fact even more so (the Dauntless being a propellor-driven aircraft, while the FH-1 is very distinctively not).
  • When Ens. George Gay is forced to ditch his crippled TBD Devastator the clip is of an F6F Hellcat.
  • Speaking of the F6F, stock footage of Hellcats is used for pretty much every scene intended to depict the F4F Wildcat. The Hellcat wasn't deployed in combat until September of 1943 (the Battle of Midway was in June of 1942) and though sharing a family resemblance, there's really no mistaking a Hellcat for a Wildcat. This includes takeoff, landing and dogfighting scenes, and the famous scene of Tom Garth crash-landing his damaged fighter and splitting it in half after striking the tower.
  • Most combat scenes of the Devastator torpedo bombers instead uses the TBM Avenger. While there were Avengers involved at Midway, there were only six, all of them from a squadron on the island.
  • For that matter, the American dive bomber attack tends to replace the two-seater SBD Dauntlesses with single-seat F4U Corsairs. The Dauntless looks pretty much nothing like the Corsair. Other times SB2C Helldivers were used. Much like the Hellcats-for-Wildcats example above, the Helldiver appeared much later in the war. Unlike that example, it bore no resemblance to the Dauntless whatsoever.
  • A B-17 crash-landing at Midway was stock footage also used in Tora! Tora! Tora!. Doubly egregious because the aircraft not only is flying an earlier-war paint scheme, but because the runway it was utilizing was at a large and fully-paved airbase. Midway was... not.
  • Generally averted, surprisingly enough, with the Japanese aircraft. Most footage of Zeros, D3A Dive Bombers and B5N Torpedo Bombers utilizes the modified T-6 Texan Aircraft Understudies rather than stock footage, and what footage is used tends to depict the correct aircraft.
• Values Dissonance: When a courier comes to tell Admiral Yamamoto about the Dolittle raid on Tokyo, the first subject brought up is the safety of The Emperor, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were in danger are not even mentioned.
  • Japanese officers' oaths were to the The Emperor (even if he was at least partly their puppet). According to Bushido (both the real thing and the version they used in 1942), to let enemies attack the homeland was bad, but to expose your lord to danger (even though the palace wasn't a target) was unforgivable. Plus it undermined their justification for holding power. There was also the fact that the Japanese Emperor was a divine ruler (one of the problems with Japanese unconditional surrender after Hiroshima).
  • Japanese culture of the time was centered on the Emperor, so this is likely Truth in Television. It doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't care about civilian deaths, but their culture and upbringing held the Emperor above everything. It sounds like callous propaganda to the modern Western audience, but would be perfectly normal in historical context.
  • In fairness American soldiers would probably do the same thing if DC was bombed and the President was there. The Secret Service has this as their mandate.

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