Pearl Harbor (2001)
DIRECTOR: Michael Bay
CAST: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight, Colm Feore, Tom Sizemore, Cuba Gooding Jr., Dan Aykroyd, Mako
REVIEW:
Pearl Harbor is intended to be a crowd pleaser, combining a wartime historical backdrop to rouse patriotic American audiences flocking to the theater with one of those melodramatic wartime love stories from the 1950s or 1960s. Considering it’s a product of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay, it also features lots of splashy special effects, “dramatic” slow-motion shots, cheesy one-liners, corny “patriotic” speeches, over-the-top flag-waving, and stuff blowing up real good. When it comes to the centerpiece depiction of the Pearl Harbor attack, the $135 million budget is all over the screen. It’s a pity a little more effort couldn’t have been spent on the script. Also, that centerpiece sequence only occupies about 35 minutes of a bloated 183 minute “epic” runtime.
While the movie is titled Pearl Harbor, it’s really the saga of a couple of flyboys and lifelong best friends Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), starting with a brief prologue in the 1920s where Rafe cements their bond by coming to Danny’s defense against his abusive father, an embittered WWI veteran (William Fichtner). From there, we jump into 1940, as Hitler’s Nazi Germany is advancing on all fronts and Rafe and Danny are fighter pilots under Major Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin). We awkwardly establish—-via some semi-comedic scenes and cheesy “romantic” dialogue—-Rafe’s love affair with nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), before he volunteers to aid the British in the Battle of Britain. Meanwhile, Danny and Evelyn are both stationed at the idyllic Pearl Harbor, seemingly far removed from the war, and when Rafe is supposedly killed in action, they turn to each other for comfort and fall in love…just as Rafe returns from the dead. But this love triangle melodrama is about to be rudely interrupted by the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like James Cameron’s Titanic a few years earlier, Pearl Harbor has the effect, intentionally or not, of trivializing the disaster it portrays by making everything about a cliched love story between three made-up characters (who all perform acts of outrageous heroism during the attack, none of which really happened because none of the three protagonists are real people). Along the way, the historical backdrop—-Rafe’s involvement in the Battle of Britain, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) masterminding the surprise attack, Pearl Harbor’s naval commander Admiral Kimmel (Colm Feore) oblivious to the forces bearing down on him, intelligence officer Captain Thurman (Dan Aykroyd) becoming the cliched “expert no one listens to until it’s too late”, and the reactions of President Roosevelt (Jon Voight)—-gets short shrift, skimmed through enough to give us a superficial understanding of the larger context. Japan’s motives for the attack is related in a throwaway line about the United States cutting off its oil supply (no mention of its Imperialist ambitions or alliance with Hitler). How hazy does the movie’s grasp of history occasionally get? A pseudo-newsreel—-narrated by a not-at-all authentic-sounding newscaster—-mentions Hitler bombing “downtown London”…which must be a difficult target indeed, as there is no area of London known as “downtown”. Along the way, the script by Braveheart’s Randall Wallace leaves no cliche unused. While waiting—-and waiting, and waiting—-for a movie called Pearl Harbor to get to Pearl Harboring, we endure soap opera-style tedium involving brawling as a form of male bonding, people returning from the dead, unexpected pregnancies, and a woman torn between two lovers in a love triangle where the circumstances are neatly arranged so that there is no “villain”, all set to Hans Zimmer’s overblown, melodramatic musical score that tries (ineffectually) to prompt us to reach for the Kleenex at appropriate moments. Zimmer has done more than his share of epic film scores, but this isn’t one of his better outings. People say painfully cheesy “earnest” dialogue like “I’m not anxious to die, just anxious to matter”, and late in the movie Alec Baldwin is forced to recite a hilariously corny speech that includes “there’s nothing braver than the heart of a volunteer” that sounds like it’s straight out of a Navy recruitment PSA. There’s other painfully dumb dialogue like someone yelling “I think WWII just started!”, as if WWII hadn’t already been going for over two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor (way to play into stereotypes of Americans being ignorant of history with a USA-centric view of WWII). There’s also a fairly laughable PG-13 “love scene” filmed in slow-motion (what else?) with soft focus lighting and choral background music with two members of our triangle in tastefully restrained throes of passion on a makeshift bed of parachutes (I can’t say that’s a setting I’ve seen used in a sex scene before, and I’m not sure it’s one I need to see again).
Unsurprisingly, the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is the centerpiece sequence of the movie, running about 35 minutes and brought to vivid life by a combination of real planes and ships and mostly convincing digital animation. Suddenly, dopey dialogue takes a backseat behind the chaos, confusion, and devastation of the battle. It’s all visually impressive, especially the sinking of the Arizona, and a scene in the aftermath in which fellow sailors try in vain to rescue drowning men trapped inside is uncomfortable to watch. Actual survivors who viewed the film testified to the realism of the attack sequence. Alas, once the attack is over, the movie still has about an hour to go, putting us through more love triangle tedium and climaxing with Rafe and Danny taking part in Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo (I guess the filmmakers didn’t want to end their flagrantly flag-waving movie on a downer, so they kept going until they got to something to get American viewers fist-pumping again). While there’s nothing technically “wrong” with this or any other action sequence, something feels a little amiss about a movie titled Pearl Harbor starting in the Battle of Britain and climaxing with the bombing of Tokyo, with the Pearl Harbor attack sandwiched in the middle.
The script and the direction is more at fault than the actors. Late 1990s-early 2000s hunks Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are mostly fine, although Affleck comes across a little too cocky to be truly likable, leaving Hartnett’s quieter, lower-key Danny the more sympathetic man in the love triangle although SPOILER WARNING Affleck’s higher stardom demands he be the eventual “guy who gets the girl”. Kate Beckinsale—-often dressed and shot using backlighting and soft focus in a way that makes her look like a female screen icon of the 1940s—-is fine, although adopting an American accent sometimes makes some of her line deliveries sound a little stilted (then again, some her dialogue—-and everyone else’s—-is so corny that it’d be hard for anyone to make it sound good). Alec Baldwin is fine as the gruff Doolittle, and Jon Voight offers a credible FDR (although the latter’s overdone makeup job isn’t always entirely convincing). Cuba Gooding Jr. has basically a glorified cameo giving a little spotlight to a little-known hero of WWII, the cook Dorie Miller who became the first African-American to be awarded the Navy Cross and nominated for the Medal of Honor for his heroics during the Pearl Harbor attack (he helped carry wounded sailors to safety, then commandeered an anti-aircraft gun and, despite no prior training in gunnery, managed to shoot down at least one Japanese plane and possibly several), although the character drops straight out of the movie once the attack is over. In other supporting roles we have Dan Aykroyd (playing it straight) as the tactical analyst Captain Thurman, Colm Feore as Admiral Kimmel, Mako as Admiral Yamamoto, Tom Sizemore as the mechanic Earl (making his second trip to WWII after Saving Private Ryan), Ewen Bremner as a stuttering comrade of Rafe and Danny, Jennifer Garner (the future Mrs. Ben Affleck) and Jaime King among Evelyn’s fellow nurses, and small roles for the likes of Michael Shannon, Kim Coates, Tony Curran, Nicholas Farrell, Leland Orser, Tomas Arana, Scott Wilson, and William Fichtner.
Like Titanic, Pearl Harbor is not completely without value, but just as one had to do with Cameron’s “epic”, one has to sift through a lot of cliched soap opera “love story” to get to the centerpiece sequence (there the sinking, here the Japanese attack). The film Tora Tora Tora offers a far more detailed, docudrama depiction of the buildup and execution of the attack from both the American and Japanese perspectives (though its dry documentary-style tone and lack of any strong character identification might take it to the opposite extreme of something like Pearl Harbor). Pearl Harbor only truly takes flight when the special effects take center stage over its bland and cliche-ridden “human interest” melodrama. Unfortunately, that’s not for long enough.
* * 1/2