Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Pearl Harbor

Movie Guru Rating:
Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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Even the good parts aren't that good

by Matthew T. Everett

During the long middle sequence of Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese military finally gets around to launching its attack on the idyllic island naval base, I had the eerie sensation that I'd seen all of this before.

It was, without a doubt, a stunning action sequence, a technical tour de force of bombastic and moderately graphic violence, crammed full of the kind of technical detail that Tom Clancy fans and World War II buffs love, all of it wrapped around a gripping mini-narrative, told well enough, about two hot-shot country fly boys trying to get a couple of planes off the ground so they can run those dastardly Zeros back to their fleet in the Pacific.

And yet...it all seemed so familiar. It only dawned on me at the precise moment that the U.S.S. Arizona was standing perpendicular to the surface of the harbor, poised to sink to the bottom, that there wasn't a single immediate predecessor for Pearl Harbor. No, this was instead a replay of both of the last two Important Hollywood Event Dramas, the chaotic combat footage of Saving Private Ryan superimposed onto the love-triangle-and-a-sinking-ship plot of Titanic for something that, I imagine, was intended to be even bigger and more breathtakingly epic than either of those earlier films. (I can picture Hollywood über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the brains behind this effort, pitching Pearl Harbor to the studio executives at Disney: "See, it's like Saving Private Ryan, but it's like Titanic, too! Can I have $135 million?")

But what Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay end up with instead is a real crapper of a movie, a directionless, fractured and trite melodrama built around a 45-minute action set piece that does nothing more than reinforce the Bay/Bruckheimer team's reputation for blowing things up.

We start off with a looooong set up—at nearly an hour and a half, there's enough room here for a brisk feature film—of the tragic-heroic love triangle among Rafe (Ben Affleck), his best buddy Danny (Josh Hartnett), and the beautiful but bland Navy nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale). In the long lazy months of U.S. isolationism before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rafe falls for Evelyn, then she falls for him—it's the best four weeks of their pretty young lives—then he ships off to join an elite squad of American fighter pilots defending England from the German air attack. Rafe's shot down over the English Channel, Evelyn's face the last image in his mind, and assumed dead. Back in Hawaii, Evelyn and Danny struggle to deal with their loss, until one day they find themselves doing more than just consoling each other.

Then—surprise!—Rafe shows back up in Pearl Harbor. See, he wasn't really killed at all, a startling revelation for all of those viewers (God bless their eager little hearts) who bought the idea that the top-billed star in any Memorial Day-weekend release can get himself killed off in the first third of the movie. No, Rafe got rescued by a French fishing boat and spent months in Occupied France, unable to get word out that he was still alive.

The only thing, of course, that kept him going in the face of such insurmountable personal horror was the thought of returning to the ever-faithful Evelyn. But he finds her embroiled in a rote, by-the-numbers affair with his best friend, a plot turn apparently put in place so that we don't have to be bored with, you know, too much stuff about history or something.

Danny and Rafe trade drunken punches while wearing Hawaiian print shirts, then start to reconcile. And that's where we learn the important historical impact of the attack on Pearl Harbor: these two friends, torn apart by the cold hand of fate, are brought back together on the field of war, and the subsequent American bombing of Tokyo in the spring of 1942 allows one of them to sacrifice his life so the other can live happily ever after.

So there you have the crux of the movie: If you think your best friend is dead, is it OK to sleep with his girlfriend? Apparently so, if the greatest military conflict of the 20th century provides an easy way to get one of you out of the picture—for real, this time—soon enough.

I can't really say anything about the historical accuracy of the film. I'm sure the details of the planning and strategy are true enough—excluding the shot of Japanese planes flying over a group of kids playing baseball at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, or Jon Voight as FDR, proving to the military brass that anything is possible by grimly rising up from his wheelchair.

But the spirit of it is all wrong. The larger context of American isolationism, Japanese aggression in Asia, and the war in Europe are ignored entirely; military strategy is presented as a schoolyard fight, where bluster and guts count for more than firepower and industrialized production; and World War II itself, a defining moment in modern history, is largely treated not as a political event but as a chance for boys to become men.

Oh, and Cuba Gooding Jr. is in this, too. Did I mention that? If not, it's because his role as a Navy cook who mans a machine gun during the attack is a throwaway. Funny how Hollywood tries to give roles to minorities and just looks worse for it by making them such tokens.

Unfortunately for Hollywood at large, everyone involved with the production of this movie—and especially me—I got exactly what I expected from Pearl Harbor.