Midway

A landmark Second World War battle over the Pacific Ocean is brought to the screen with all the boom and bluster you'd expect from the director of such effects-laden fare as Independence Day and The Day after Tomorrow. Roland Emmerich favours spectacle over subtlety, and while he has described the film as a passion project rooted in historical accuracy, the absence of fully-rounded characters for audiences to care about gives the impression of a cold, clinical computer game. Patrick Wilson fares best as the naval intelligence officer whose warnings about the scale of Japanese fire power initially go unheeded by more senior military figures, including gung-ho fleet commander Chester Nimitz (played by Woody Harrelson, giving a master class in scenery-chewing). Emmerich offers a fairly balanced portrait of both the US and Japanese forces, but there's never any real sense of the human cost of Midway, the death toll all but dismissed as the acceptable price of global conflict.