Midway, a 2019 "independent" movie that cost 100 million dollars, is about how foreigners doing terror bombing is bad, but doing terror bombing ON foreigners is retribution justified not just in retaliation for wrongs perpetuated upon history's main characters - The Whites - but also in atonement for not recognising the dangers of leaving the foreign devil to his own devices.
In Midway, much is made of America's need to strike back, but little is seen of why it hadn't joined a war that was two years old already, as - SPOILERS FOR WW2: Americans were going to sit the war out if they could, much like Britain had tried to do already and, well, no-one ever accused America of learning a lesson easily, any more than anyone has ever accused America of opposing rather than gleefully embracing authoritarianism.
It kind of sucks coming to a movie like this in my twilight years, the joys of a thousand potential futures shaped by the boundless dreams of youth finally drained from my increasingly-frail and failing body to be replaced with the bitter cynicism of lived experience, as I like to think* that if I'd seen this when I was a perpetually-drunken and uneducated dipshit cruising through a life without consequences, I would have at least enjoyed the way director Roland "Stargate is my most historically accurate work" Emmerich made a new spin on what is now known as the Death Star Trench Run by simply portraying dive bombing with historical and technical accuracy, the practically-suicidal technique of slowing a plane to within a hair's width of its stalling speed before flying it towards enemy guns and/or diving from above the effective range of flak straight into a barrage of exploding death and hoping you didn't run into one of the billions of white-hot fragments of shrapnel flying around at supersonic speeds is - it turns out - quite an exciting affair to watch unfold, and Emmerich does it well on multiple occasions, only slightly let down by the film's coloring, which too often makes the difference between physical objects and CGI a bit too obvious.
I am as surprised as anyone else to find myself not hating this, thus sparing my already-overtaxed liver the trouble of making more bile to poison me and expedite my journey towards the cold embrace of the grave. Roland Emmerich has failed to hasten the day of my death, and it's not often I can say that about a film.
* possibly "like" is too strong a word, inferring as it does the possibility that I might still be capable of even a molecule of happiness.
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