Midway (2019) / YMMV

Critical Dissonance: In true Emmerich fashion, the film had lukewarm to negative reviews from critics but was viewed favorably by the audience.
Funny Moments:
- After McClusky is promoted to air group commander and will be piloting a Dauntless, Best suggests he get some practice in since McClusky (who until then had been commander of Fighting Squadron Six, flying F4F Wildcats) had little experience with dive bombing attacks. McClusky shoots back that it can't be too hard since they let Best do it.
- John Ford directing reveile on Midway, right down to browbeating the bugler over holding his horn too low, and insisting the color guard lower the flag so they can do another take.
- Anne Best chewing out McClusky over the fact her husband hasn't been given a squadron command yet while having a night out at a club. McClusky looks for all the world like he'd just flown right into the middle of the entire Japanese air force.
So Okay, It's Average: There's an immense amount of research put into the movie, and it shows. However, the script and direction could have been better at delivering more than just a serviceable movie.
Special Effects Failure: One of the complaints of the movie is that many of the explosions, when looked at critically, are rather cartoonish, and more harsh critics have called them worse than ten-year old video game graphics systems.
Spiritual Successor: To Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor — a film with heavy amounts of Artistic License – History about heroic American pilots fighting the aeronaval forces of the Japanese in the Pacific theater of World War II, by a director known for his love of big budget onscreen mass destruction.
Tainted by the Preview: Response to the trailers was mixed, with some viewers negatively comparing the film to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, often derisively calling it "Pearl Harbor 2".
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One of the single biggest criticisms of the film was that too many events were being squeezed into too short a movie, and that any one of the story lines could have made for a movie in of itself. As a result, many events (such as the Doolittle raid and the sinking of the Yorktown) were glossed over more than they should have been, and the film often failed to fully develop its characters.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Although some of the effects were considered shaky by critics, the film would nonetheless have been impossible to make without them, and it's also been acknowledged that they did a superlative job of depicting the sheer scale of the battle.
- Enterprise, Yamato, Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu have all been faithfully recreated, rather than relying on modern stand-ins (which Pearl Harbor had been sharply criticized for). Enterprise is correctly depicted without the deck edge elevators that were introduced with the Essex class, Yamato sports her distinctive chrysanthemum badge on her bow, and Akagi and Hiryu even have their island superstructures on the correct (port) side.^note
- There are no TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bombers surviving intact anywhere in the world (above water, anyway^note), as every example ever built had either been shot down, lost in accidents, destroyed for damage control training, or simply scrapped by 1944. A full-scale mock-up had to be built for the production using only photographs and technical references, in addition to the CGI models used for the battle sequences. The film's Devastator was so accurate (right down to the location of the carpet tacks used in place of rivets, and the Devastator's distinct ribbed wing surfaces) that following wrapping of photography, it was accepted for display by the USS Midway museum, which normally rejects reproductions.
- While the previous Midway had often been criticized for the inconsistent use of period footage leading to aircraft changing types between shots (Heston infamously went from flying a Dauntless, to an Avenger, to a Vindicator, back to a Dauntless, to a Helldiver, and finally crashing an F9F Panther jet fighter) no such issues occurred here thanks to the use of CGI.

YMMV / Midway (2019)

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