Ragesh Dipu
The first teaser trailer for director Roland Emmerich’s war epic ‘Midway’ has surfaced online on Thursday. Based on the real events that led to the historical Battle of Midway in 1942, the movie follows the dive-bombing pilots and sailors in Midway who fight tooth and nail against the aggressive Imperial Japanese Navy. The trailer gives a glimpse of the decisive battle that changed the course of the war in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
The clip starts rolling with the intro lines “based on the incredible true events,” while a little girl stares off into the sky. When a couple of plates vibrates in the sink, the mother Ann Best (Mandy Moore) anxiously looks out of the window only to witness the nightmarish scene of an explosion. While she runs out in panic to call her little daughter, the trailer reveals a full view of Japan’s Pearl Harbour raid that took the U.S. government by surprise.
Lt. Commander Edwin T. Layton (Patrick Wilson) is sitting his head down after the attack while a voice over announces: “Pearl Harbor is the greatest intelligence failure in American history.” Determinant to prevent the next attack, he guesses the next Japanese attack will be on Midway. When the top guns reject his findings on the face, Layton declares, “Washington is wrong.”
The teaser hints that the officers who find out the next target after Pearl have to fight with the American bureaucracy. Apart from Wilson and Moore, the movie also stars Ed Skrein, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, Luke Evans, Luke Kleintank, Darren Criss, Aaron Eckhart, Jake Weber, Nick Jonas, Etsushi Toyokawa, Tadanobu Asano, and Jun Kunimura.
Wes Tooke, best known for ‘Colony’ and ‘Jean-Claude Van Johnson,’ wrote the screenplay for Emmerich, who is the man behind action-packed movies like ‘Day After Tomorrow’ and ‘2012.’
“It shows an America that’s not the superpower, a country that just came out of a big recession and tried to stay out of the war but got sucked into it. It was a simpler time, but it also was a time when you had to put your life in danger for ideals,” Emmerich told USA Today last week.
In order to evade comparisons and similarities with the 2001 war epic ‘Pearl Harbour’ directed by Michael Bay, Emmerich approaches the historic moment from a different angle. The plot centers on the dive-bombing Dick Best (Skrein), an unsung hero of Midway who, along with his fellow pilots, decides to fly down on Japanese aircraft carriers at an angle of 90-degree from 14,000 feet.
In the closing scene of the trailer, Dick Best comes down at full throttle toward the Japanese fleet a 90-degree angle. While bullets pouring down on his plane, he glances at a photo of his wife and child. “Today we are gonna be underdogs. Today we are going to prove that the U.S. Navy is not a joke,” declares the voice over.
Lionsgate will release ‘Midway’ on November 8, 2020, Veterans Day. Check out the teaser trailer below.
Cover Image Courtesy: Lionsgate.
