'Pacific' Producer Making Big 3-D Midway Movie

I suppose there are some practical applications to this. After all, Steven Spielberg basically shut down the technological advancements in war films with the opening of Saving Private Ryan, an unforgettable sequence that never gets enough credit for changing the language of film. After that, war movies needed to reinvent themselves. By and large, that hasn't happened; if memory serves, the best WWII film since (if we're just talking motion pictures and not including miniseries), is Letters from Iwo Jima, which is not as much about the front lines. But here comes something: Bruce C. McKenna, a producer and writer of The Pacific, has been working on a film about the Battle of Midway, one of the pivotal moments in US military history, and a battle that rocked Japan back on its heels. McKenna says the way to portray the action is, you guessed it, in 3-D. Could it work? I think it could. A lot depends on who's making the film. For these purposes, I don't think you can go CGI for the battle sequences. You can accomplish a lot with computers, and it's been a long time since Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, but there's no point doing the spectacle if it's not really there. Not in this case. That's my gut reaction. I understand how much more difficult this is on film crews, and how shaky waterborne projects are to begin with. But then don't do the movie. It's going to be very expensive either way, but I think for it to be really special and to capture it most effectively, you have to put boats in the water and planes in the air. The film is already budgeted at $200 million, and as a comparison, the last major naval conflict movie, Master and Commander, was $150 million, so that's not much of an increase after inflation.

Comments

[J.Bradley]

Okay, let me get this straight - they're makin' a World War II naval battle movie with battleships and carriers and planes and then there's battleships and carriers and planes - of the Japanese, all of which doesn't exist anymore and none of it's gonna' "be CGI"!
It's gonna' be CGI.
The key thing is how they do it and hopefully they have a better dramatic story to tie everything together that's better than the '75 movie they made on the same event.

[common]

Sry.."a better dramatic story"??? Its the battle of MIDWAY!!!! You don't get more dramatic than the turning point of the war in the pacific. Holleywood needs to stop adding stupid stories to real life stories that tell themselves better than any script righter could. Hell if Midway didn't happen in real life its actually kinda cheesy and propaganda-like in the ending.

[common]

my god i need to spell better....

[J.Bradley]

Well you can't just have a tick-tock account of EVERY thing that happened, that's not a movie. Maybe a docu-series. You have to have a character or characters that you follow through this event and what they're trying to do or be or whatever - that's a story, not just THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY. The main thing is that they make that more dramatically compelling than what they did in the overblown '75 movie - and PLEASE, for all that is human, better than "Pearl Harbor". I'm thinking they'll just scale down what they did on "The Pacific" to where they're just covering the scope of that one major battle and a few choice characters or character in it.