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Dauntless: The Battle of Midway

E362B76D-8442-4AE2-8169-CD071679F4A5Dauntless: The Battle of Midway is a “mockbuster” - a low budget film that’s intended to capitalize on the publicity surrounding a blockbuster movie by a large studio.  Even the trailer indicated that the special effects were not quite ready for the big screen, but since I’d go to Des Moines to see a community theater production about the drama involved in loading torpedoes, of course I was going to get the Blu-ray, which is the only release this howler will ever have.

The set consisted of three rooms, two aircraft fuselages, a pool and the ocean, and the speaking cast was 13 people.  (I counted both).  Astonishingly, most - maybe all - of the movie was filmed in the director’s back yard using green screen, and the extras show the director and three buddies building the SBD fuselage. I thought it looked pretty good until Parker noticed something that was pretty obviously a 2 x 4 cross-section.  Everything else - and I mean everything - was special effects.  Picture Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  It’s like that.

I’m not exaggerating, nor am I condemning.  When the live action is combined with the special effects, the result is pretty good.  The lighting is way off, which has a tendency to spoil the effect, but the detail in the CGI is remarkable.  The Enterprise, in particular is - until next month - by far the best screen representation of the ship, and it is quite accurate - although it mixes the ship’s appearance during different periods.  The Hornet is often seen sailing less than a thousand yards beside it, and although the camouflage scheme has the usual error - which I have yet to avoid - of not using Haze Gray above the flight deck, it’s still pretty good.  Until you see that the two carriers sport giant flight deck numbers - a black 6 on Enterprise and a white 8 on Hornet.  

That’s one of the disappointing things about the movie.  Low budget notwithstanding, it gets so much right, both in story and detail, then misses equally accessible details.  The SBDs have the correct markings, but the wrong propellor tips.  The captions accurately identify all the squadrons and events - then a pilot will refer to meeting up with “VB-6”, when I’m pretty sure they always referred to the squadrons as “Bombing 6”.  (At least that’s the caption Dick Best put on my Midway print in 1992 - he signed it “CO Bombing 6 USS Enterprise 4 June 1942” so I assume that’s what it was referred to at the time). And the aircraft are scattered on the deck, rather than in a tight deck pack prior to launch, which I found grating - and inexplicable. How could so much attention to detail go into the effects and then have easy errors like Mk 37 gun directors and a giant flight deck numeral 6 on  an Enterprise that is otherwise almost exactly accurate for June 1942. Literally the only other error I saw was a missing catwalk on the starboard side of the stack - which was a post-Midway change.

It’s also jarring when the dramatic launch of the SBDs from the Enterprise is accompanied by Jupiter from Holst’s The Planets.  The attack on an under detailed but accurate Kaga is accompanied by Mars before the music segues into something broadly similar, but which I didn’t recognize.  Not bad, but ... jarring.  But it is really fun to watch things happen during the flight that match up with the historical record, even when it doesn’t contribute anything to the movie.  

But if you watch it on a small enough screen that the effects don’t distract, it does tell a couple of good stories.  Judd Nelson as Admiral Raymond Spruance spars with C. Thomas Howell as Captain Miles Browning and they replay various generally accurate confrontations, mostly after the 4 June attack.  For example, the “turn the lights on” scene (Spruance did it at Midway two years before Mitscher at Philippine Sea) and the “I’ll do what you pilots want” scenes are accurate as long as you’re not checking precise dialogue. Nelson handles Spruance well, and he provides the narrative for the movie, explaining in a couple of sentences of dialogue what the tiny movie could never have shot (if only because the director’s back yard wasn’t big enough). At this level, the story is spot-on. 

The heart of the movie - which to its credit it makes hard to watch - is the ordeal faced by downed pilots who drifted in the ocean for days, and in some cases weeks waiting for rescue. The movie tells the story of two specific pilots from the Enterprise who ditched after bombing the Kaga, and long after I’ve forgotten the inaccurate effects or bad writing I’ll remember the insight it gives watchers into the special hell that must have been.

In the end, if you dream of seeing an almost perfectly accurate June 1942 Enterprise filmed cinematographically launching its strike on the morning of June 4 - this movie is for you.  But I’ll understand if you want to wait till next month.  I just couldn’t.

 

October 24, 2019 in Film, History - Naval, World War II | Permalink | Comments (0)

First Man - the annotated screenplay - Josh Singer

29BBB9BF-3882-4784-8885-13AFBDD3223EI picked this up to see what decisions they made making the movie - how much was strictly accurate, how much was moved around or modified, and what was admittedly created for the movie. And I absolutely loved it.

As you’d expect, the book reveals the movie that was written, the movie that was filmed, and almost all of the movie as it was edited - the book wrapped four weeks before the film did so some final cuts aren’t reflected.  

November 12, 2018 in Books, Film, History - Naval | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Little Chaos - Alan Rickman, dir.

ImageJamie and I watched this movie tonight, and absolutely loved it. I have been interested in the history of the Versailles gardens ever since Jamie and I went there, and this provided a nice little fictional story about the creation of one of them. Kate Winslet was wonderful in it.

August 21, 2015 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marie Antoinette - Coppola, Sofia

Marie-antoinette_poster Outstanding movie.  I skipped the French-dubbed versions available in Versailles for the original English at the local Blockbuster when we got back, and thoroughly enjoyed this the other night.  The movie was shot at the locations we had just seen, including Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte and the Opera Garnier, and included many anecdotes and stories that I'd just read.  The modern take on the period (no accents, and colors and fashions are a little pastel for historical accuracy) gives it a real freshness, but the story is as accurate as my reading has thus far gone, which surprised me, and fairly complete in its scope.  It tells the full story of the Austrian girl who became the French queen starting with her being sent to France to marry the dauphin (the future Louis XVI) and ends ... well, I'll just say later so as not to spoil when it actually ends the story.  (We went to the tiny chapel built over Marie-Antoinette's cell at the Conciergerie, from which she was taken to her execution, as well as a recreation of her cell built nearby, so her fate is not really something that's a subject for humor for me.  When you're looking at the actual floor bricks of her cell, it sort of brings home what happened - she was imprisoned with soldiers sharing her cell, her ten year old son was taken away - her other son died three weeks before the Bastille fell - her husband executed, and then she was wheeled out and executed before a cheering mob.  Actually being there, it was brutal, inhumane, and as I told Jamie when we left, a good example of why we should never forget how important our rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are.  The French under the Revolution didn't have either, and they summarily executed over two thousand people without niceties such as due process, counsel, and so forth.  I'm not saying ours have always been scrupulously observed - God knows they haven't been from time to time - but you still realize staring at her cell how bad it could be (and I'm not even getting into the state-run torture chambers that were across the hall.  It's just being a lawyer - the powerlessness of people against th tyranny of the state just gets to me.  One of Shakespeare's characters once said that to successfully gain and keep power the first thing they had to do was to kill all the lawyers.  Well, in Revolutionary France, they did.  They executed the king, and then they executed the lawyer that tried to defend him).

But I digress.  Kirsten Dunst is outstanding, and the entire cast just does a great job.  I also liked getting to watch the director giving direction to the cast during the documentary - you rarely see the actual direction in those documentaries, but here you did.

August 15, 2009 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0)