I saw Midway. Audiences are loving Midway but it is getting panned by the majority of the critics for lack of character development and because the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) isn't believable. I have never been strafed by a zero or been on the deck of a carrier while attacked by a Dauntless dive bomber SBD so I can't say. I thought the CGI was kind of cool. I do think that the character development was lean because the scope of this movie was too aggressive. It starts out with a code breaker serving as attache in Tokyo in 1937 having a conversation with Yamamoto followed by Pearl Harbor, various carrier raids, the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, Coral Sea, and finally Midway.
Ed Skrein plays Dick Best. Dick Best is an SBD pilot on the USN Enterprise. His claim to fame is that he is the only carrier pilot during the war credited with successfully dive bombing two carriers in a single battle. Ed's gum chewing New Jersey accent annoyed me a bit at first and took some getting used to. I was surprised that Woody Harrelson did a good job of playing Chester Nimitiz.
Here's the good part: The movie, for all it's faults, tells the true story of Midway. I mean they got the nuanced details correct. This was a labor of love for the director who strived to get the story correct.
It's not going to replace Private Ryan or Fury but, like 13 hours, they got it right and didn't make things up (like Hollywood is prone to do). for example, they had a scene where the code breakers were talking with Nimitz. They told him that they had 40% of the Japanese code broken. They knew that the Japanese were attacking an island designated as AF but which island was AF? So they devised a ruse. They had Midway send out an uncoded message that the desalinization plant was down. Shortly after that they uncoded a message to the Japanese strike force (Kido Butai) to bring a water ship with fresh water. They knew that AF stood for Midway. Also, Washington ordered Halsey in the South Pacific. Nimitz, the commander in theater, thought that Halsey's strike force was needed at Midway. So Nimitz, in cahoots with Halsey sent him a secret message to get spotted so that he could recall his strike force to Hawaii and then be redeployed at Midway.
Now that I think about it, I highly recommend it. A 7 of 10.