Dauntless: The Battle of Midway is a 2019 historical drama about a two-man crew of a U.S. Navy dive bomber who are forced to ditch in the sea during a ferocious battle.
No matter the quality – good or bad – of director Mike Phillips‘ war drama Dauntless: The Battle of Midway, it is its visuals that will be how it is judged, the heavily CGI-enhanced war film one with a good story filmed with low budget effects. It’s a risky choice and without big studio money behind it, falls well below expectations for your average movie fan used to jaw-dropping, seamless, ultra-realistic imagery. That’s not to say there’s isn’t some genuine effort to make it convincing, because undoubtedly a lot went into doing so, but when your current home gaming console can deliver better graphics, it’s a little hard to get and stay on board with this, even when everything around it is pretty good.
It’s World War II, June 1942 and the Japanese are continuing their domination of the Pacific Theater. To try and turn the tide, the US Navy heads to Midway with a carrier group, looking to surprise the enemy. Norman Vandivier (Jade Willey) is a navy pilot, flying a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber with his gunner Lee Keaney (John Enick), joining formations to head off and attack the Japanese fleet. It’s chaos in the sky, but they manage to hit a few targets before taking damage, forcing them to ditch in the ocean. With only their life jackets and hundreds of miles from their own carrier, chances are low for getting spotted, but it doesn’t stop their fight to stay alive.
Let’s put aside the often very obvious green screens and saturated computer visual effects for a moment and take a bite out of the story. It’s not exactly deep, with a familiar tale of two people adrift at sea, this one happening with a war raging just beyond the horizon. We don’t get to know much about Norman or Lee, only that that they are dedicated to their country and this is Lee’s first flight off a carrier (and they are based on real people). While they spend much of the movie bobbing up and down on the waves, the carrier group is led by Admiral Raymond Spruance (Judd Nelson) and his number two Commander Miles Browning (C. Thomas Howell), the two not agreeing about strategy or the risks to be taken with the men.
It’s a mostly pedestrian conflict though, not really given any teeth, the two biggest names in the movie reduced to extended cameos, leaving the rest of the movie to balance on the shoulders of the two men in the ocean and a ragtag team of men in a PBY search and rescue plane trying to find them. These parts are the most effective, the filmmakers working hard to be authentic, and there is a lot about the movie that feels legit, with attention detail from wardrobe to planes to jargon and more all plenty convincing. It’s just that Phillips doesn’t have the money to back it all up, the scope of the project far too big for the budget he’s got and the script simply too generic and weightless to deliver the thump we want. The actors deserve much of the credit for giving this as punch as it does, but unfortunately, it never grabs hold like it should, even with a twist-like ending that sort of doesn’t feel earned.
All this is of course primer for the big show coming in November with the release of Roland Emmerich‘s blockbuster Midway, and maybe comparisons are unfair. It’s clear that the team involved with Dauntless weren’t in in this half-hearted, doing what they could to make a small but effective war movie. On many levels they succeed, but when it’s over, there isn’t much to make this any more significant than so many others like it. It will surely have some fans – and deservedly so – but most may not get what they are hoping for.