In Roland Emmerich’s chaotic portrait of the Battle of “Midway” appears as one of many secondary characters, John Ford (Geoffrey Blake), one of the most successful American film Directors of the 30s to the 60s. He is best known for his westerns, but in 1942 he was, in fact, as part of the film crew of the U.S. Navy, at the naval battle in the Pacific, and turned a spectacular documentary about it: “The Battle of Midway”.
The Pacific war was, in this sense, from the beginning, a cinema war – and the white also Emmerich, of any amount for more war films to resonate. Above all, he takes up motifs from the first “Midway”movie: Jack Smight directed the battle in 1976, with Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston on the American and Toshiro Mifune Japanese actor, who had participated in the war and the Film, with all the Patriotic Pathos, a melancholy Dimension, which is missing completely in the new Version.
a New perspective: The battle of Midway re-packaged. Video: Youtube/Ascot elite
Emmerich relies entirely on Action; to be “Midway” begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, to the left in the cinema, especially many of the tracks. Since the movie by Michael Bay, from the year 2001, which translates the national Trauma into a powerful, triumphant, Blockbuster is of course.
In Emmerich’s “Midway” halls to draw, unfortunately, those previous films after that attempt, a more complex picture of the war. In turn, John Ford, made in 1945, immediately after the end of the war, with “They Were Expendable” in the beginning: not a documentary, but a ballad about the helplessness of American soldiers, lost in the Vastness of the ocean. Clint Eastwood was dedicated to the war of the Pacific in 2006, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima,” two movies, one from American, one from the Japanese perspective; a dialogical, thoughtful Form of war film-making.
probably The most radical counter-design to the pompous history of blockbuster cinema à la Emmerich and Bay, but from the year 1968: “Hell in the Pacific” by John Boorman plays away from the big battles on a secluded island. Here is an American and a Japanese soldier are stranded and deliver a bloody, completely senseless private war.
In various cinemas
07.11.2019, 10:26 PM
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