Directed by Jack Smight and produced by Walter Mirisch from a screenplay by Donald S. Sanford,[2][3] the film starred Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda, supported by a large international cast of guest stars including James Coburn, Glenn Ford, Ed Nelson, Hal Holbrook, Robert Webber, Toshiro Mifune, Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, Pat Morita, Dabney Coleman, Erik Estrada and Tom Selleck.

The film was made using Technicolor, and its soundtrack used Sensurround to augment the physical sensation of engine noise, explosions, crashes and gunfire.

Despite mixed reviews, particularly involving the use of stock footage and an unnecessary romance subplot, the music score by John Williams and the cinematography by Harry Stradling Jr. were highly regarded; as evidenced when Midway became the tenth most popular movie at the box office in 1976.

The Japanese fighters are drawn down to wave-top altitude by the low-flying torpedo planes, leaving them out of position when dive-bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown arrive.

Hiryū is reduced to a burning wreck, and Yamamoto, during a general withdrawal, takes responsibility of apologising for the failure to the Emperor.

As Enterprise docks at Pearl Harbor, the injured younger Garth is carried off the ship, seen by Haruko, as Nimitz and Rochefort reflect on the battle.

[5] Naval aviator Lieutenant Richard "Dick" Best and Joseph Rochefort served as consultants; George Gay, the only survivor of Torpedo Squadron 8, visited during filming.

Lexington were persuaded to have their hair cut and to shave to conform to World War II Navy regulations after watching the filming.

The regular soundtrack (dialog, background and music) was monaural; a second optical track was devoted to low frequency rumble added to battle scenes and when characters were near unmuffled military engines.

The US Navy Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Lexington played the part of both American and Japanese flattops for shipboard scenes.

Shortly after its successful theatrical debut, additional material was assembled and shot in standard 4:3 ratio for a TV version of the film, which aired on NBC.

The TV version also added Coral Sea battle scenes to help the plot build up to the decisive engagement at Midway.

[14] In June 1992, a re-edit of the extended version, shortened to fill a three-hour time slot, aired on the CBS network to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Midway battle.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The movie can be experienced as pure spectacle, I suppose, if we give up all hopes of making sense of it.

But there's no real directorial intelligence at hand to weave the special effects into the story, to clarify the outlines of the battle and to convincingly account for the unexpected American victory.

"[20] Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that "the movie blows up harmlessly in a confusion of familiar old newsreel footage, idiotic fiction war movie clichés, and a series of wooden-faced performances by almost a dozen male stars, some of whom appear so briefly that it's like taking a World War II aircraft-identification test.

"[21] Arthur D. Murphy of Variety thought that the film "emerges more as a passingly exciting theme-park extravaganza than a quality motion picture action-adventure story ... Donald S. Sanford's cluttered script, while striving for the long-ago personal element, gets overwhelmed by its action effects.

"[22] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "[t]he battle scenes run hot and cold."

He praised Henry Fonda as "absolutely convincing" but stated that Sanford "deserves a year in the brig for inserting amid the battle scenes a stupid subplot involving a young American sailor in love with a Japanese-American girl.

"[23] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it a "tired combat epic" and wrote, "Hollywood may mean well, or imagine it does, but it's a little appalling to think that authentic acts of bravery and sacrifice have become the pretext for such feeble, inadequate dramatization.

"[25] Janet Maslin panned the film in Newsweek, stating that it "never quite decides whether war is hell, good clean fun, or merely another existential dilemma.

This drab extravaganza toys with so many conflicting attitudes that it winds up reducing the pivotal World War II battle in the Pacific to utter nonsense.

He described the film as a "final, anachronistic attempt to recapture World War II glories in a radically altered geopolitical era, when the old good-versus-evil dichotomies no longer made sense.

This is a famous radio transmission but it was made a month earlier during the Battle of the Coral Sea by Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon after his dive bomber squadron sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shōhō.

[citation needed] Matt Garth's further exploits were pure fiction and resembled deeds of at least two more figures: first, an intelligence officer on Fletcher's Task Force 17 staff, and then the leader of the last attack made by dive bombers from USS Yorktown, by the VB-3 dive bomber squadron led by LCDR Maxwell Leslie.

Among the first aircraft shown taking off to defend Midway are two Army P-40 Warhawks: only Marine F4F Wildcats and F2A-3 Buffalos had been stationed there.

In addition, Yorktown was damaged and sunk by torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine which had penetrated the destroyer screen, rather than survived the air attack seen in the film.

One of the most flagrant misrepresentations is Garth's collision at the very end of the movie, which is followed by footage of a Grumman F9F Panther jet plane crash which actually occurred on USS Midway in 1951.