Those little flaws are just evidence that these guys wanted to make this movie however they could, and they did a fine job in that regard. Don’t let it get in the way of a good story. In all, when you see the painted-over, unfinished cuts in the 1x2s they used to build the 1:1 SBD cockpit, don’t sweat it. Only Band of Brothers and The Pacific (and a few Eastern European films) have done that better recently. Dauntless follows that advice well: I liked how they let the confusion of the Big Picture stand (if you don’t know the order of battle, Dauntless won’t explain it to you), and instead focused on the motivation of the individuals involved. In art school they taught us the old Modernist strategy: Through the specific, address the universal. In the end, you’re spot-on: someone finally told the story right. If you can slide into the idea that you’re watching animation when the tactical scenes begin, I think Dauntless was actually very good at characterizing the scope and drama of the flight deck, bomb runs, and the spectacle of two giant forces clashing. We have to start looking at CGI scenes as what they are: animation. There’s just no possibility of putting a squadron of SBD-3s in the real air, nor a quartet of A6M2s and the occasional TBD. Midway was a Hallmark movie Dauntless is a Greek Tragedy.Īs for the CGI, I’ve had a revelation: the days of Battle of Britain are over. It did a much better job of contrasting the accomplishments of the event with the cost paid. As a narrative, it’s a better film than Midway, with more fully drawn characters. The thing about B movies is you gotta forgive the production values. I’ll double down: I think it is even better than you give it credit for.
Just watched it while working on my Tamiya Corsair, and it made me want pull out my Trumpeter Dauntless. I never thought I would see a film that depicted the tension between the controversial Miles Browning and his pilots. (I didn’t think Woody Harrelson could play a believable Nimitz either, but he did). I hope this movie will serve as an audition for this production team to become worthy successors to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and get some real money to play with.Īs a kid of the eighties, I never imagined Judd Nelson could credibly play Admiral Spruance or C. Sort of a parallel metaphor for how admirals Nimitz, Spruance and Fletcher approached the real battle. This was done by people who care about history and wanted to do the best they could with what they had. While the CG is what it is, it is extremely accurate in all the details, even more than in Emmerich’s feature. I don’t know whether it was intentional to debut this a few months before the big Roland Emmerich Midway epic, but I am afraid many like me passed this one by waiting for the big show. I was assuming they used a real one from a museum somewhere. The Dauntless looked damn good, by the way.
The pacing could be a little tighter, the actors’ performances a little crisper in places, but when I saw that the director was literally building a full-scale Dauntless mock-up (using the Trumpeter kit for reference, by the way), working twenty hour days to finish it the day before shooting, I am inclined to cut him some slack. Actually, a more apt analogy is marveling at the kid who plays a beautiful Mozart concerto on a piano missing several keys because its all he can afford to play on.įrom a strict film critic perspective, there are elements in the movie that could be better. Thank God, these guys did.Ĭriticizing anything about their effort feels like complaining that my neighbor’s 4-year old son was flat in several measures in his performance of Carnival of Venice or that he used sloppy penmanship in working out his calculus problems. I daresay, the director and producers would love to have made this with a huge budget, but this is not the kind of movie Hollywood wants to make anymore. This is a movie made with love that aims high. Some films are low-budget because that is all they aspire to be.
DAUNTLESS MOVIE FULL
There is no question the movie is full of CG and was made on a low-budget. Since I first heard about it last year I had written-off any possibility of Dauntless: The Battle of Midway being good.
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