Wake Island

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Jared D This fictionalized telling of the Battle of Wake Island should have stuck more closely with what actually happened and the actual people. The film is well-paced and has a great cast -- but it dissolves into a bunch of cliches by the midpoint. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 08/21/21 Full Review william d Acceptable WWII era war movie if you don't mind bad acting in your melodramas. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review steve d The lack of personalities of its characters hurts it. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review Audience Member One of a slew of propaganda films to be released in 1942 this film serves more as an interesting historical document than a film to be enjoyed. It was honored by the Academy as most films that dealt with the subject of the war were in 1942 but it was beaten out by the more commercially appealing Mrs. Miniver (1942) and has largely been forgotten in the years since it's release. I watched the film in an attempt to watch all Best Picture nominees and I have to say that I feel I wasted my time in watching it as while it was only 89 minutes it didn't occupy that time with anything of real interest and I struggled to differentiate between the characters. The highly capable Major Geoffrey Caton, Brian Donlevy, is assigned to serve as commander of the Pearl Harbor naval base and has to leave behind his loving wife and daughter to do so. The young Shad McClosky, Albert Dekker, flies there with him and when they arrive Caton quickly comes into conflict with the bumbling Joe Doyle, Robert Preston, and Aloysius K. Randall, William Bendix, who like to carry out pranks and complain about their superiors. The Pearl Harbor attack occurs and quickly destroys their peaceful existence as they are all forced to go into battle and many of them crack under pressure. Despite agreements with Emperor Hirohito the Americans are betrayed and the morally correct American servicemen heroically fight back against the somewhat stereotyped Japanese fighters. The Americans are initially victorious in fighting back against a surprise attack but men lose significant loved ones as Bruce Cameron, MacDonald Carey, discovers that his wife was killed as a result of the attack. Sadly all of the men are killed by the Japanese and the audience is informed that they must continue supporting the war effort. It is fortunate that the film is so brief as at only 88 minutes it is hard to lose interest in the fairly thin plot of the film and the underdeveloped characters and instead focus on the glory of the loud explosions and impressively choreographed battle scenes. At times it felt like the weak forerunner to Twelve O'Clock High (1949), another film that I do not particularly like, as the shots of fighter pilots in their planes and the dialogue they shouted clearly influenced this later product. It is not Farrow's fault that he had to work with the limited technology of the day but I think that he could have tried harder to make his film different than others of it's type as this was a movie that was too similar to In Which We Serve (1942) and Flying Tigers (1942) to secure a place in the place of the minds of audience members. The acting was uniformly poor as even those who would go on to have major careers like Preston come across as amateurs and they each seem to be directed to play blandly heroic and likable men. This is what makes it difficult to care about them or even tell them apart as like a lot of later war movies including Black Hawk Down (2001) they all look the same, speak the same and sound the same. If the film had been making a statement on the fact that war causes men to become robotic figures who are all mirror images of one another as they slowly lose their individuality and freedom. No, it is not trying to make a deeper point about anything because what the screenwriters, Farrow and the actors are trying to do is produce a film that appeals to as broad an audience as possible and for families, the assumed target market of this film, it is inoffensive to see the same slightly cheeky boy populate the film without having to confront any new or negative emotions. For the time the battle sequences would have been impressive as the bombings and the men bee lining towards various shelters were shot simply and without artifice. It was hardly Saving Private Ryan (1998) but these scenes did rouse me from my slumber and draw me back into the film as it was technically proficient and able to encapsulate the thrill of war. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member Watching Wake Island now it simply seems like another in a long line of WWII films. It is a straightforward story that focuses on a single event that occurred shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. However, there is more significance in this film when you take into account when it was made. Wake Island was actually a film released only months after the event actually happened. It’s almost a propaganda piece showing the courage of our boys at war and what we lost that led to our participation in WWII. The storytelling was a bit light in this film, because they just walk you through events as they played out. I appreciated that they at least established a couple of interesting characters, but the way the war scenes played out I never felt like I got a satisfying resolution for any of their stories. Wake Island is a movie that had a purpose at the time, but since has been outdone by a number of better WWII films. While I respect the actual men who gave their lives in this event, I’m not sure this movie was the most effective way of honoring their sacrifice. Sadly, I think this will be another film in the genre that I will forget over time, because it left no impression on me. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/21/23 Full Review Audience Member The story of the Battle of Wake Island told from the perspective of a couple of unruly Marines (Robert Preston and William Bendix), their commanding officer (Brian Donlevy) and a civilian construction contractor (Albert Dekker). Made right near the beginning of the American involvement in the war and just a few months after the events depicted, the film is understandably basically just a rallying cry for the American public. Does it succeed on those terms? Not really. The film takes the form of a story about not very good people finding the best in themselves when facing adversity. The problem is that most of these characters are such awful people, I completely fail to care about them at all, even when they take on waves of invading Japanese soldiers. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Wake Island

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