Michael Bay’s 2001 war movie Pearl Harbour has been given a real kicking over the years. There’s even a whole song dedicated to it in Team America: World Police (sample lyric: “I miss you more than that movie missed the point, and that’s an awful lot”). So it’s safe to say that with World War II naval battle drama Midway, Roland Emmerich hopes to fare better. Depicting the Battle of Midway – a pivotal four-day attack in 1942 near the Hawaiian Midway Islands, six months after Pearl Harbour – the film casts the likes of Ed Skrein, Luke Evans, Woody Harrelson and Patrick Wilson as the men who pulled off a major naval victory.
Skrein plays Dick Best, the real-life dive bomber who sank a Japanese aircraft carrier during the titular battle. When Emmerich visited Pearl Harbour during his research, the current admiral of the fleet was vocal with the filmmaker about his dislike of previous naval warfare films. “He attacked me and said, ‘Is this another of these stupid Hollywood movies? Let me tell you something. There’s one guy in this whole story nobody ever talks about. Who in this room knows Dick Best?’,” Emmerich recalls in Empire's October issue. “I raised my hand and said, ‘My whole movie’s about this man!’”
Read more about Midway in the new issue of Empire, on sale now – and available to order online here with free UK P&P. Midway arrives in UK cinemas on 8 November