Yes....... You have recited precisely what I mean
Most of what people think they know about Midway is not really correct
Damn...... I’m all het up now and have to go read it some more
Movies are, in the end, almost always focused on entertainment, not history, though when they can do both well, that is a good combination.
I never liked the original Midway movie shot a few decades ago, because I have a thing about visuals REALLY not matching, such as using the Texans as Japanese planes, or modern day ships as WWII era ships.
When they don’t outright lie and make things up out of whole cloth.
That said, I just re-watched the movie “Darkest Hour” about one of my heroes, Winston Churchill, and I was ashamed to admit that I absolutely loved a part of the movie they just fabricated out of thin air, the scene of Churchill riding the Underground.
Normally, that kind of thing would make me just turn the thing off, but I found it so fun and charming a fantasy that I actually accepted and enjoyed it. But it isn’t history, no doubt about that.
But if someone didn’t know history, and accepts it as such, well...it is like the time when my wife and I went to a theater to see “Apollo 13”, and as we were walking out, I heard a teenage girl in front of us say to her boyfriend “I was glad the movie ended the way it did...”
I still get a rueful chuckle about that, but it is a problem that people blindly accept movies as historical documents.
I still want to see a sweeping movie made about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. I think that would be a great movie, now that they know how to leverage CGI in a meaningful way. Never happen, but...I can always hope.