I have always had a copy of Midway to run in the background while uttering around the apartment or the house, and when I heard 3 1/2 years ago that they were coming out with a expanded edition with features and better image, of course I got it. But I got a nasty surprise when I tried to watch the feature and couldn't get it to play in stereo - it kept playing only in the center channel, i.e. mono. Two years of fiddling with the DVD to no avail finally drove me today (when I really wanted to watch it) to look it up on the Internet and see if maybe I just wasn't selecting the right setting. Turns out that it only comes in mono, not 5.1 channel Dolby Digital, as I thought. But there's a reason - it is 1.1 mono, with the .1 channel being the subwoofer. Why? because the movie was originally released in Surround Sound, so the new release approximates that with one channel sound plus the Surround effect replicated in a subwoofer (which is what it really was - a crude subwoofer channel under the explosions). Satisfied, I hooked up the subwoofer that I have to this point not used, thinking it wasn't working, and liked it. It is crude, but the sound never really bothered me. The picture is better (this is also the first movie I have watched on the new screen in the movie room) and I enjoyed the movie more than I recalled.
As for the movie itself, it is agonizing inaccurate. The uniforms are right, but that it just about the it. But once you get used to that, it's really a well told story, well-acted, and with a generally accurate version of events. It got the intelligence angle right (Joe Rochefort was right and Washington was wrong - something that didn't show up in the history books until the mid-60's) and humanized the story well with Heston's character. The subplot about the internment of his son's Japanese-American girlfriend didn't annoy me like it does others, although his "don't give me that racial bigot crap" comment is a bit too p.c. for 1942. It is an unnecessary subplot, although how else could you get a woman into the story? In addition, I particularly like the Japanese officers - they're so formal and earnest, and if the actors are sometimes a bit melodramatic (and I flat can't handle Nagumo with a mustache or Yamamoto with that horrendous voice-over) they did come across a lot better on the big screen. Nagumo in particular had a lot more nuance than I'd ever noticed.
Anyway, enjoyed the movie. Almost made me forget I'm home sick with strep throat.