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Midway is an ambitous film that sets out to follow the United States entry into World War Two, from the attack on Pearl Harbour through to the Battle of Midway. To tell this story it focuses on two main characters who are also based on real life people. There's Ed Skrein playing Dick Best, a pilot on the USS Enterprise, and Patrick Wilson playing intelligence officer Edwin Layton.
As you might imagine jamming seven months of war into just over two hours is a big task, and while they did manage to pull this off, the result is a movie that feels rushed, where we can't get to know all the many characters, and which probably requires a pretty strong knowledge of this time period in history to understand all the things that are rapidly being thrown on screen.
I actually had a lot of trouble telling who was who in many of the scenes involving the pilots. Apart from Ed Skrein and Luke Evans the rest of the pilots and rear gunners are such a copy / paste of each other and they come and go so fast on screen that you have zero time to have any kind of emotional connection to them, even though the movie tries to make you feel for them. For a lead actor, Skrein is very wooden and uninspiring, and I don't think has shoulders big enough to carry his part of the film.
Then, as if the 10,000 mile an hour story is not bad enough, this movie relies very heavily on visual effects. Apart from close-ups, everything you see that involves a ship or a plane is entirely CGI and it is woefully bad 99% of the time. I've used the Playstation analogy a lot, and this is another example. I feel like if they had cut back the story to not cover so many fights and battles, there would have been a lot less visual effect shots. And with less shots to create and render, perhaps those remaining would have come out looking more realistic. As it is, it really takes you out of the movie - the planes move like they are weightless and defy the laws of physics, the explosions look they were made in AfterEffects, and each scene on a ship has that horrible green screen glow about it.
In summary I think this movie suffers from trying to do too much all at once. This came off feeling more like a trilogy of movies about Pearl Harbour, The Doolittle Raid, and The Battle of Midway had been edited down to one single movie. The end result is a rushed film that is hard to follow, whose characters are difficult to connect with, and whose visual effects are video game level at best. This will not go down in history as a great war film.