Pearl Harbor

PEARL HARBOR

Rating: C+

The human interest story here is pure hackwork. Hot jock pilot Ben Affleck falls for army nurse Kate Beckinsale, and makes a pest of himself until he finally wins her over with his sheer stupidity. Then he goes off to fight the Luftwaffe with the RAF, and dies in a watery plane crash. "What's so bad about that?" you ask. The bad part is he comes back to life and finds his best friend (Josh Hartnett) is now pregnant with Beckinsale's child. Or maybe it's Beckinsale who's pregnant - I forget. The point is it's the same tired old love triangle baloney we've seen a hundred times before. The idea of introducing human stories against a background of a grand-scale event only works if the audience cares about the people. In this film, the people are such cardboard cutouts, we don't care about any of them. In fact, they're so sappily annoying that I almost found myself rooting for the Japanese.

Let's be clear here - this movie is three hours long, and absolutely nothing of any importance happens until literally 90 minutes into it. (I would suggest having a friend save you a seat and arriving about 80 minutes late.) Once the attack on Pearl Harbor finally begins, there are some good scenes mixed in with some mediocre ones. The shots which are perhaps the most chilling occur when the Japanese planes pass overhead while Norman Rockwell events (such as kids playing sandlot baseball) transpire beneath. Unfortunately, their impact is blunted by the fact they were featured in the theatrical previews and everyone in the audience has already seen them twenty times. Once the bombs start falling, many of the large-scale shots are executed through rather obvious computer imagery, which severely hampers their effectiveness. To be brutally honest, the miniature effects in Tora! Tora! Tora! made 31 years ago are often superior, which isn't particularly good news if you just spent $120 million producing this film. Throughout the attack, one feels director Michael Bay desperately trying to give us shots which we've never seen before, while at the same time attempting to bring the action down to a personal level. All in an attempt to break up the monotony of seeing one explosion after another. He's only partially successful, and when the attack finally does end, you won't be saying "Gee, I wish they showed us another twenty explosions."

Bay often seems to go out of his way to sabotage his movies with stupid visual gimmicks. In The Rock, the entire car chase was ruined because the cameraman apparently mistook a paint shaker for his tripod. And I'm not exactly sure why whenever a group of men in a Michael Bay film have an important mission ahead of them, they all begin walking in slow motion. But as I watched Pearl Harbor, I thought maybe Bay had finally grown up. (I know, I know - stupid me.) Then we got to the hospital scene...

Bay spends considerable time showing us scenes of bravery amid chaos in the Pearl Harbor base hospital. Although interesting, they'd probably be more impressive had he not chosen to film them through the bottom of a Coke bottle. You think I'm kidding about this. I fully expect an article in the next issue of American Cinematographer describing how the cameraman tested various brands of soft drink bottles until he found the "look he was after." Have fun watching this mess on DVD on your new hi-def TV.

Fortunately, there's an unexpected treat in the film's final hour, as it profiles the retaliatory U.S. air raid led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. Although pilot Ted Lawson chronicled the operation in his book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (later turned into a movie), the raid holds a much lesser place in the American psyche than the Pearl Harbor attack, so it's a pleasant surprise to see it granted considerable screen time here. I suspect Bay included the raid because he was desperate to end on an up note, and there is precious little about the attack on Pearl Harbor which was upbeat for the Americans. He succeeds for the most part, since the bravery of the men who volunteered for what they knew was a one-way mission is inspiring. But he runs into trouble again when the men start crash-landing in Japanese-occupied China. When he greatly simplifies their rescue, he also trivializes the brutal ordeals many of them faced after they fell into enemy hands. But, as they say in Hollywood, never let the truth stand in the way of the box office.