Since I have already watched both Band of Brothers and The Pacific recently, today I elected to watch a trio of Pacific theater movies - They Were Expendable and The Sands of Iwo Jima, both old black-and-white movies starring John Wayne. These are a different breed of movie than anything made these days, but they are both worth a watch. Good movies.
The third movie I watched was the more recent version of Midway. I really like this one ( and no, I don't give a crap about CHI complaints) for its accurate representation of the aircraft that participated in that battle, sans the F4F Wildcat. The dive bombing scenes were not terribly accurate, though, but do make for exciting eye candy.
loved this new version of Midway saw it in the movies and on VOD
they did not do as good of a job as humazing the participants as they did in the original non-CGI version back in the late 60s
and Ponch from CHIPS was a fighter pilot in F4F in that one!!
the horror of having 15 of 15 torpedo bombers in TBM 8 shot down one by one is insane... 29 of 30 crew members were killed within 10 minutes.
I just saw an actual interview with Major Dick Winters from probably the mid 1990s on Youtube
he was explaining that he spoke with Lt. Speirs who he was very good friends with
and that Speirs agreed he had shot the prisoners and would not sue HBO if that was included in the series (!!)
Winters in another episode claimed that the Holland Dyke scene where he runs up in front of the rest of the company, was the only time in his life he lost control and became a killing machine on autopilot
that when he ran onto the dyke, there was a german sentry who popped up and smiled at him and then Winters shot him right away (as portrayed in the series)
Since I have already watched both Band of Brothers and The Pacific recently, today I elected to watch a trio of Pacific theater movies - They Were Expendable and The Sands of Iwo Jima, both old black-and-white movies starring John Wayne. These are a different breed of movie than anything made these days, but they are both worth a watch. Good movies.
The third movie I watched was the more recent version of Midway. I really like this one ( and no, I don't give a crap about CHI complaints) for its accurate representation of the aircraft that participated in that battle, sans the F4F Wildcat. The dive bombing scenes were not terribly accurate, though, but do make for exciting eye candy.
loved this new version of Midway saw it in the movies and on VOD
they did not do as good of a job as humazing the participants as they did in the original non-CGI version back in the late 60s
and Ponch from CHIPS was a fighter pilot in F4F in that one!!
the horror of having 15 of 15 torpedo bombers in TBM 8 shot down one by one is insane... 29 of 30 crew members were killed within 10 minutes.
The original Midway actually came out in 1976, but that was literally the best movie I had ever seen until I went to a theater in Sugar Land in June 1977 to see a movie I thought would be bad (Star Wars).
The earlier version did a good job telling the basic story of Midway, and you're right, that one put forth better characters instead of the rather wooden characters we got in the remake. But they also had an utterly meaningless romance subplot which added nothing to the characters involved in it. I'm also sure they utilized some real aircraft but mostly they used existing footage from the war or from earlier movies such as Tora! Tora! Tora! The trouble with this approach is that the filmmakers just looked for footage that fit what they wanted on screen with nary a concern about whether the aircraft in the footage was actually available in June 1942. There are Hellcats, a Corsair, and a Helldiver in a lot of that footage, none of which were there. I get that a Hellcat bears a strong resemblance to a Wildcat, and I also get that most people are not going to (a) notice the differences or (b) care (but then there are those like me, WWII aviation nuts, that will notice and perhaps even care). The most idiotic footage that also happened to fit the plot was when Charlton Heston crashes his Dauntless on the carrier. The explosion was fantastic, but if you look closely, you'll see a part of the aircraft roll out of that explosion that is definitely not a Dauntless - it's actually an F9F Panther jet fighter, which was a Korean War-era fighter.
Even with all of that, I still love that movie.
The remake was a better movie from a technical point of view. While watching it the first time, I felt like I was seeing the words from the book Shattered Sword projected onto that screen. They also had the right aircraft, with one notable exception that I think was due to their focus on the dive bomber squadrons. That exception is no Wildcats. As opposed to the original, this one had one of the worst scores I've ever heard. The visual effects were pretty damn good (but then, I'm not a CGI-hater as many seem to be).
Since I have already watched both Band of Brothers and The Pacific recently, today I elected to watch a trio of Pacific theater movies - They Were Expendable and The Sands of Iwo Jima, both old black-and-white movies starring John Wayne. These are a different breed of movie than anything made these days, but they are both worth a watch. Good movies.
The third movie I watched was the more recent version of Midway. I really like this one ( and no, I don't give a crap about CHI complaints) for its accurate representation of the aircraft that participated in that battle, sans the F4F Wildcat. The dive bombing scenes were not terribly accurate, though, but do make for exciting eye candy.
loved this new version of Midway saw it in the movies and on VOD
they did not do as good of a job as humazing the participants as they did in the original non-CGI version back in the late 60s
and Ponch from CHIPS was a fighter pilot in F4F in that one!!
the horror of having 15 of 15 torpedo bombers in TBM 8 shot down one by one is insane... 29 of 30 crew members were killed within 10 minutes.
What some people don't know about that Midway footage is that it was filmed by John Ford, one of the greatest director's of all time. He was on Midway during the battle and was wounded.
