‘Midway' Turns The WW II Battle Into A Cartoon

The first thing director Roland Emmerich should do after his latest movie “Midway” hits theaters is apologize.

Apologize to the visual effects crew, the stuntmen, the carpenters, the costumers and artists. He has squandered their considerable visual skill in retelling the crucial World War II battle at Midway by melding some of the best action sequences in years with the most banal of words.

What’s the point of scouring 1941 Navy regulations to ground the real-life characters in authentic military gear if they say stuff like this: “I guess every battle needs a miracle.”

What’s the point of locating the original blueprints of a gun, and then carefully recreating it, if the script calls for an airman to tell his pilot: “You fly like you don’t care if we come home.”

Emmerich has turned ”Midway ” into another of his films, “Independence Day,” which was cartoony but worked because we knew it was over the top. Here, the director has taken real, living men who acted heroically and turned them into pulp comic strip characters. He might need to apologize to them the most.

Screenwriter Wes Tooke has apparently never seen a cliche he didn’t want to embrace. His script is as textured and nuanced as an upbeat newsreel from the ’40s. No, there’s no young G.I nicknamed Brooklyn, but there are hotshot flyboys who stick their chewing gum next to a photo of their wives in the cockpit during dogfights.

Tooke’s one-dimensional characters help the plot along by stating only the very obvious, like “If we lose, we lose the Pacific” and “This place is a powder keg.” (Keep that last one in mind; stuff will blow up and it will be called foreshadowing.)