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Review: Pearl Harbor
That's more or less the message of Pearl Harbor, the bloated epic by Michael Bay that purports to capture America's defining moment as it was drawn into the world's most awful war, but instead bogs down almost from the opening shot in a dreary, protracted and curiously unfeeling love story.
It's actually two movies, the better one buried deep inside the first. To begin with, we met the poor but super-wholesome Rafe McCawley (Affleck) and Danny Walker (Hartnett), best pals from Shelby, Tennessee, who -- under interminably complex, global and slow-moving circumstances -- fall in love with the same girl, nurse Evelyn Johnson (Beckinsale). She mopes through this 183 minute drama, sad-eyed and stunned, as if she had an IV pumping Valium into her.
Just in case, you haven't been seeing those trailers all year, the two little rascal stars are stealing and flying their parent's crop-dusting airplanes around even before reaching puberty. You get this funny intuition all that barn-storming and derring-do might lead to the skies over Pearl Harbor one day. (Yes, yes, they tell the recruiters: they were born to fly).
The screenwriter is clearly going for another grand-scale Titanic. Big history, big tragedy. The writers didn't find one of America's most humiliating military defeats big enough to carry the film. So he and Bay wrap all the jazzy bombing, aircraft maneuverings and other action sequences inside this snoozy love story, in which the stars perpetually gaze at one another in sorrow, regret and anticipation. They know pretty quickly -- duh -- that "this war is going to catch up with us one day," as Nurse Johnson actually says. We know it, too. But the movie sure makes us itchy for it to actually happen.
The film should have been content to bring us the story of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which is rendered with considerable skill as the use of computer animation continues to mature in movies. From the moment the first Zero glides over the mountains, the movie handsomely delivers on a richly-imagined aerial attack and the resulting chaos and tragedy. And thanks to great animation, it's one of the first movies to give us the bullets and bombs' point-of-view, from the planes right into the ships and hangars.
When the explosions are erupting one after another, tracers are tearing up the ground, and one great ship after another is blowing up and rolling over as waves of Japanese planes rip up the napping Pacific Fleet, the movie really works. You see the dimensions of the bone-headed military incompetence, as warships are tied together in the middle of the harbor, unable to fight, move or flee. Like Titanic, but unlike Saving Private Ryan, the gore is softened -- this movie is rated PG-13. A lot of gauzy, fast-framed hospital scenes avoid gaping wounds and severed limbs. But Pearl Harbor does capture the mayhem, suffering, terror and horrific sense of being trapped in a burning, sinking battleship.
The actual attack -- the movie within the movie -- is fast, furious, dramatic and entertaining. Too bad it takes so long to get to it. It does save the movie, however.
Otherwise, it's pompous and heavy-handed, from it's golden opening scenes to the gaseous voice-over narration at the conclusion. We hear grim and prescient declarations from Japanese military officials, and a non-stop symphony of choruses and angel choirs to remind us every few moments that what we are seeing is important and that everything changed after Dec. 7, l941. This Pearl Harbor is so busy signalling its significance that it's like being trapped in high school history class.
Jon Voight reverentially plays Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seems as stunned as everyone else in the movie by almost everything that's happening. Cuba Gooding plays Dorie Miller, a black cook on board a U.S. ship who grabs a machine gun and becomes one of the first Americans to fight back. Gooding does a decent enough job, but his only purpose seems to be injecting a faint note of reality into a story that turns the pre-war United States into scenes from Norman Rockwell.
To further muddy matters, the movie adds a sub-plot involving Doolittle's Raiders, the U.S. Army Air unit that first bombed Tokyo. That story is riveting; the pilots were on a virtual suicide run, since the bombers they flew couldn't carry enough fuel to return to safe waters, forcing them to ditch over China. But the saga feels like an afterthought in this movie, a strained vehicle for keeping our hunky fly-boys in the plot beyond all reason. The battle at Midway was really the Navy's payback for Pearl Harbor, and the turning point in the Pacific conflict.
Unlike Saving Private Ryan and Titanic, both of which went to extraordinary lengths to be historically accurate, this movie wanders far from the truth. Military historians say the actual battle was very different from that portrayed here -- shorter, more geographically limited, involving fewer planes, buildings and civilians.
One interesting aspect: it's shocking to see the primitive technology just 50 years ago. One reason Pearl Harbor was attacked so successfully is that the U.S. Navy couldn't find a trace of the vast Japanese Naval Task Force that crept 4,000 miles across the ocean to carry out the attack. The fleet simply vanished into the Pacific for weeks, leaving military officials to guess at its location. Cryptographers hadn't yet broken the Japanese code -- which they would a few months later -- and which led to the great U.S. naval victory at Midway. One of the world's first radar stations had just been constructed in Hawaii, but Naval officials unaccountably ignored the flight formations it was picking up in the hours before the attack. Today, satellites and electronic surveillance would have made any such stealth impossible.
But the movie most suffers from the wooden performances of its stars, who seem overwhelmed by the burden of so portraying so much history. At least Voight's Roosevelt is supposed to be concious of history.
In Titanic, a film this ones tries hard to emulate, the characters were were warm and compelling, but the real star was the great ship itself, for nearly a century the embodiment of technological hubris and human fate, bravery and tragedy.
The attack that launched American involvement in World War II did shock the nation and the world, and forced a reluctant bystander into the gruesome global conflict. It was historically more central than the Titanic's sinking and, given the 3,000 dead it left in its wake, should have been as or more powerful a tale. But at the hands of this filmmaker, the story shrinks and sinks.
Will there be similar effort put into the movie about the American holocaust of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Nine years in the Navy and you don't even know history? Several US planes made it off the ground during the attack. Most piloted by men that were still wearing pajamas.
Also, it was Army pilots that did the Doolittle raid. Navy aviation was limited to Navy fighters, which were just that, fighters. No bombers were (or ever were) flown by Navy pilots.
Quit being so bitter, and just enjoy the movie.
Well, if we're going to talk about Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we definetly need to talk about the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese killed more Chinese civilians there than both nuclear bombs. Why doesn't anyone talk about this. In my mind, the Japanese got what they deserved. [Please moderate me up]
>you think dropping a nuke on 250,000 is a good
>thing when it saves you from killing 500,000,
>but actually both are crimes
I guess this depends on your perspective.
If someone breaks into my house and I blow him away, thus preventing him from killing/raping/otherwise doing harm to my family, have we both committed crimes?
Not in this state, buddy.
From my point of view, I've done a civil service.
Here is a better review. A review by someone who sees movies the way they are meant to be viewed: as entertainment.
See, here's the thing. If you go to see it for those five (? ten? fifteen?) minutes of wet dream CGI, you will be encouraging them to make more movies like this. If, Ghu forfend, enough idiots do likewise, it may even mark yet another slip into the pits for the movie industry, for bad plots, unlike good ones (along with directors and casts up to doing them justice), are available in abundance. Let them pay off handsomely and you can be sure you will see more of the same, and more and more.
Oh, wait, that's already happening. Well, bunky, it can get worse. How much worse? Trust me, you can't imagine how bad it can get if no one has to worry about making a good movie.
So just don't go. And tie your spineless friends, the ones who heard that it had a great fight scene, to a chair and don't let them go. If we don't stay away together, then we shall surely be driven away individually.
Slashdotties, the gauntlet lies at your feet.
Hiroshima (1995) , is a film that was made in a similar way to Tora! Tora! Tora! showing both the Japanese and American sides of the war.
"Nip" is a derogatory term. Pay respect to the dead; they fought and died for their country like our men did for ours.
interesting to note that the first shots between the US and Japan in world war two were not from the planes over Pearl, but from an American destroyer outside the harbor which sunk a Japanese submarine. This of course was ignored, as was massive radar detection.. oh well.
This review/commentary of the movie suggests that in reality, "for at least a year before the attack, FDR pursued a policy of goading the Japanese to do it. He saw no other way to overwhelm American isolationist sentiment and get the country to enter the war against the Axis powers."
Don't know whether that's accurate or a conspiracy theory, but I thought it was interesting enough to mention.
It appears that Pearl Harbor has been badly received by critics. "Not since Battlefield Earth have critics gotten so creative when bashing a movie." ObCredit: BluesNews.
Alex Bischoff
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
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The Longest Day, while overly dramatic at times, does have nice bits of accurate history in there. The book is even better.
Apollo 13 was also pretty good, especially after having seen the excellent Nova documentary on the subject just a few weeks before.
Das Boot, though not a recount of any specific event, is a riveting film and fairly accurate depiction of life on a German WWII U-Boot.
Yes, Tora! Tora! Tora! is a classic. Highly recommended.
Generally, I've found that A&E and the BBC/PBS put out good docu-dramas covering a much wider variety of subjects than you'd get from Hollywood. I'm thinking specifically of Longitude and the Masterpiece Theater portrayal of Alan Turing (don't recall the title offhand, but it starred that always wonderful Derek Jacoby). Great stuff!
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I can't specifically remember that part from the documentary, but NASA certainly doesn't have a contingency for everything. That would be a waste of time and money. They didn't have a contingency for an O2 tank explosion and fuel cell loss, for example. But this point is very, very minor and doesn't take away from the accuracy of the movie at all.
How do you know? Modern profanity has been used for a very, VERY long time.
Of course. Check the subject of this thread. We were asked to name "pretty accurate" movies, not historical matches.
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Remember the Titans (with Denzel Washington) was pretty good. It's the story about the integration of a Virginia high school (American style) football team in 1970 IIRC. There's definitely a few liberties with what really happened, but at least the movie didn't have random big explosions.
My favorite review, and one I agree with completely, called Perl Harbor a great war film stuck inside a three hour soap opera. Another good one said that "We now have a wonderful story of love placed on a backdrop of a chilling war. It's called The Thin Red Line. Perl Harbor sucked." Or something like that. It might have been a movie other than Thin Red LIne, I've never seen it to be sure.
Then it's a good thing that's not what happened. He was rescued by French sailors, and _hidden_ in occupied France - NOT languishing in a POW camp.
Your protests about historical inaccuracy ring a little hollow when YOU are inaccurate regarding a movie YOU'VE JUST SEEN.
You mean, aside from the scene where a bunch of hardware is dumped on a table, and the engineers are told that they need to figure out what can be used to help the astronauts survive? (they'd worked out contingency plans like that well before the flight)
How about the level of profanity used by the Apollo crew? It's hard to believe now, but they DIDN'T talk like that.
It's called "artistic license", or "being creative" - and because of that virtually NO movie which claims to "based on a true story" is going to be completely accurate.
For example, in "Erin Brockovich" there's a woman who is awarded $5 million for her family's illnesses. In real life she received FAR LESS, and she and many of her neighbors a very bitter over the way they were _used_ by Erin and her lawyer boos)
But who'd go to see a movie about a shyster lawyer and his manipulative employee successfully conning a town into suing a power company for the lawyer's benefit? Not many, I suspect. So instead we got a movie which matched a favorite Hollywood stereotype (plucky woman beats evil, nasty company - and everyone cheers).
No, it wasn't. Your report must have been flawed. The poles connection is true, but the enigma codes vital to decryption effort were captured by H.M.S. Petard from U559, this happened nearly two years before US entered the war.
I believe a US crew did capture an enigma later in the war. Anyway, your post gives the lie to the "it's just entertainment, nobody believes it" argument.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
To further muddy matters, the movie adds a sub-plot involving Doolittle's Raiders, the U.S. Army Air unit that first bombed Tokyo. That story is riveting; the pilots were on a virtual suicide run, since the bombers they flew couldn't carry enough fuel to return to safe waters, forcing them to ditch over China. But the saga feels like an afterthought in this movie, a strained vehicle for keeping our hunky fly-boys in the plot beyond all reason. The battle at Midway was really the Navy's payback for Pearl Harbor, and the turning point in the Pacific conflict.
Actually, I'm glad they put this into the movie. A lot of people forget this raid and how incredibly important it was to us winning the war. The raid was not meant for any revenge or tactical advantage. It was flown for one purpose only, and that was to scare the Japanese. At the time, the Japanese had this idea that they were immune from American attack, that their Far East island position made them invincible, since we couldn't fly all the way across the Pacific to get them (and they pretty much had a stranglehold on the Far East otherwise). When Doolittle's fliers bombed Tokyo, it showed the Japanese that we meant business, forcing them to consider a two-front war and scaring the Japanese into a more defensive posture with regards to the Pacific. Indeed, the Japanese overeagerness to push the Americans out of the war and into defeat that led to the Battle at Midway was prompted in large part because the Japanese were worried that if they didn't strike quickly, they wouldn't be able to stop a true threat in the American Navy.
While history remembers Pearl Harbor as the entry point of American into the war, most gloss over the immediate events after that and wait until late 1942/early 1943 to talk about active and positive American military involvement. The truth is that the American military was already prepared for war, and Doolittle's raid showed it.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Besides Welch and Taylor there was a flight of B-17s in the air that had arrived in Hawaii that Sunday morning. This flight was a subject of an early WW II movie called "Air Force".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Am I the only one who's been noticing the HUGE amount of Pearl Harbor history specials/news coverage/etc. on TV, in magazines, and in the newspapers lately? Sure, it IS Memorial Day after all, but it would make more sense if these history specials were being shown in December rather than May. So why so much attention to Pearl Harbor right now? Because the movie is coming out! I get this sneaking suspicion that part of some movie's advertising budgets go towards getting the news media to play these sorts of specials. For instance, remember when Man on the Moon came out and all of a sudden there was a LOT of Andy Kaufman-related coverage on TV? Coincidence? I think not :).
1) At any point, are there native hawaiians anywhere? In the trailers, all you see is caucasian americans.
2) Why, oh why, did they have Japanese planes dropping bombs while flying level? Japanese bombers were dive bombers. They never would have dropped bombs like that.
3) Was there any mention of the 'miscommunication' that led to the attack? As I recall from history classes, one of the translators made a bad mistake, and translated something in such a way that it was possible for the Japanese to take it hostilly. I don't remember it clearly at all, but I prefer historical movies to be historically accurate. I've already heard some complaints here.
Don't get me started on U-571.
They could run it as a double feature with the last half an hour of Titanic.
Any movie about the pissant bombing of Pearl Harbor should also show the amazing "punishment" that we doled out to the Japanese. Millions of innocent civilians getting fried to a crisp. It pretty much dwarfs what little the Japanese were able to do to our Hawaiin base.
Oh, and does it show the US concentration camps for US citizens that happened to be of Japanese descent?
Didn't think so.
This movie sounds like it was written to drum up anti-Oriental sentiment. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I can't help but shudder at the selective re-writing of history that this little piece of propoganda posits.
shane
I'd rather have seen this as the vehical for a couple of unknown but talented actors than two big-name morons demonstrating their lack of reverance for the country that made them rich and famous.
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seumas.com
Can we assume that you feel war to be avoidable?
We were in a very similar position in Vietnam. Many of our soldiers had a feeling that the war was wrong. It's difficult to oppose one's government in a situation like this, however; especially when you do find Communism abhorrent.
I tend to think the "UN taking away our guns" thing is off-center. However, have you read the Kyoto Protocol? Now, that is what I consider to be a reason to leave the UN.
And finally, if you want to watch something resembling the historical accuracy of Bay's Pearl Harbor, go rent The Final Countdown. :]
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driph
My apologies to those whose stomachs couldn't take it...
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Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
You missed some of the older violations of history, like the "Richard III". King Richard is portrayed as an evil hunchback ruler who will do anything to serve his ambitions. That isn't true.
So rant against whoever wrote that too, ok? I think his name was "Shakespeare" or something...
Ben
This is a very informative post, and as it is from someone logged in, I wonder how it can currently have a score of Zero? Hopefully that will change, and if it doesn't, hopefully that will be looked into also.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Besides tomcrooze's nice rejoinder, Are you aware that most groups are revising down allowable low level radiation limits due to studies of the people who cleaned up the mess. Specifically those that were not exposed intially but where moved there to supervise the clean-up and are now showing high incidents of radiation based illnesses?
Oh, wait. The USA isn't because they were told to keep it at current standards by members of the Bush administration. Standards that have absolutly no clinical basis at all. Silly me. Oh, and I do not have footnote references to back my claims as the university library is closed due to Memorial Day.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Well, that's not the whole picture either. If I recall correctly, the Enigma was stolen by the Polish Intelligence Service and then given to the British.
However, the Enigma machines used by the U-Boats were significantly different to the standard Enigma models, and thus remained unbroken until a Royal Navy ship caputred a U-Boat. You're absolutely correct, however - the Americans had absolutely *nothing* to do with the crucial cryptanalytic breakthroughs of the European war.
Of course, the Americans did break the Japanese naval codes in the Pacific theater as well, before Pearl Harbor IIRC.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Alec Baldwin's a communist for saying that he'd leave the country if Bush got elected?
Hell, the way things have been evolving since then, I'm wondering if he doesn't have the right idea...Bush's first 100 days are, to say the least, unimpressive. And the Democrats are so brain dead right now (gas price caps????? wtF!??!?) that it's unlikely they'll be able to help things much even if they control the Senate. So, I wouldn't blame Baldwin for leaving. It's a cop out on his part, and not particularly patriotic (he should stay here and fight that retard in the White House), but such a statement doesn't strike me as communist in particular.
Of course, if you're one of those types who thought that Bill Clinton was a UN conspiracy to Take Our Guns[1], who believes (deep down to your core) that Liberals are out to deliberately destroy America's economy, and whose brains would spontaneously combust if someone ever desecrated a flag within 100 yards, then I can understand where you'd think that Baldwin is Communist (where "Communist" in this context really means "Vaguely offensive to my right-of-Augusto-Pinochet political, social and moral values," or more generally, "the opposite of Patriotic.")
That having been said, I think I'm going to celebrate Memorial Day by doing something besides watching the latest Titanic. Like renting "Saving Private Ryan." There's already plenty of reasons for me not to watch this monstrosity of a film.
[1] I know he wasn't exactly a friend of the Second Amendment. And, speaking as a gun owner, I can see at least a few bright sides to the Retard President. But come on...the UN is not going to send in troops to take individually owned handguns, rifles, "assault rifles" or shotguns away from American citizens anytime soon. With all the paranoia on the side of the pro-second-amendment crowd, it's no wonder that the left thinks that gun owners are criminally insane.
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Finding God in a Dog
Another interesting take, more specifically on Pearl Harbor, is this article with a lot of evidence that the Soviet Union manipluated the USA into drawing a Japanese attack, so that the Japanese would leave the Russians alone instead of whipping their butts as in 1905.
At Hickam AFB near Honolulu, HI, the spalling caused by strafing runs during the attack has been preserved on a number of buildings still standing on the base.
It's an eerie feeling going to work in a building covered by pockmarks, and remembering exactly what that meant. Even more disturbing is noting that more than a dozen men died in the room in which I worked.
-- Cerebus
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I saw Pearl Harbor Sat. night. I knew it wasn't 100% accurate and I didn't expect it to be. I did enjoy the cgi and it made me appreciate the men and women who died so we can have freedom.
Agreed: In fact, the "emotive score" is so dominant that when it's absent from a Hollywood flick - like the excellent Falling Down - you take notice. Especially during the scene where Pendergast (Duvall) runs along the pier after spotting D-Fens (Douglas) - you just know it's supposed to have a dramatic score, but doesn't: Schumacher lets the scene speak for itself.
If you are interested in history, read some of Gordon Prange's books on Pearl Harbor, such as "At Dawn We Slept". The U.S. knew that war was imminent, but we didn't know where and when it would start.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Just continuing the tradition of /. gratuitous criticisim.
>In a more civilized country
I can't pass this one up.
A more civilized country like what? England? Australia? Where the gun control laws have resulted in a surge in violent crime?
No thank you.
America is no longer even in the top 10 in the world for violent crime rates.
-LjM
>i can't quite comprehend how arming the crims
>will make them less violent
Ah, the common non-argument that gun control laws help disarm criminals.
Criminals by definition don't obey the laws. They already HAVE guns. Didn't I see recently that the English cops have started carrying guns again?
>US gun related annual homicides 20,000,
>UK - twenty odd
Gun related DEATHS. This includes gang-bangers shooting each other up as well as individuals legally defending their own lives and property.
I'd be willing to bet those "twenty odd" gun related deaths in the UK are nearly all criminals or terrorists gunning down someone who was relieved of his right to protect himself by the government.
And the statistic that the US is no longer in the top ten IS signifcant, because it's something all the antis liked to trot out like a show horse.
And btw, the UK and Australia ARE in the top ten.
Sleep well tonight.
-LjM
I mostly agree. u571 and pearl harbor made me
rather upset.
And then there's the Patriot, where
an atrocity perped by the SS is polaced in the
hands of our rather polite "oppressors" in 1778.
The British need to remake Apocalypse Now
and have Hugh Grant sail up the Mekong to
save the Americans from themselves...
A couple quibbles:
The Italy part of English Patient was set in 1945.
It is a little bit of a scretch, but not
completely bogus. Also they were faithful to
the novel there for once.
The higgins boats at D-Day were piloted by a mix
of RN and US Merchant Marine crews. The use of
amateur crews by the US caused many tragedies
since the MM pilots would refuse to go in close
to shore. Some of the tanks capsized and sank,
for example and soldiers jumped in to 10-15
feet of water with 65 lbs of gear and a 20lb.
BAR. SPR did get that part mostly right. Its hard
to knock SPR as it came very close to reality.
What about Braveheart? Heard some Scottish historians are pretty peeved off about that one.
Of course, the History Channel interviewed the screenwriter for Braveheart, and his argument that though his movie wasn't historically true, it was emotionally true (or something to that effect. Don't remember the exact words). I think Pearl Harbor was penned by the same guy.
Je ne parle pas francais.
The foot soldiers might not have known about it, but the upper leadership of the US, UK, and Soviet military knew about. IIRC, the US government didn't want the European theater to be consider a jewish war, so they ignored all reports of the atrocities. Even gave an order to that effect.
The Soviets liberated the most Eastern death camps in '44, but reports from them were considered Soviet propaganda.
Je ne parle pas francais.
The movie had me until the two main characters managed to get thier planes in the air during the attack on Pearl... something that never happened in reality. We never got a plane off the ground. It pisses me off that these two fictional characters are getting the credit for shooting down seven Zeros that were actually shot down by real, live, breathing men in uniform... real heros. It pisses me off that this corps of fictional Army pilots also get credited for the attack on Tokyo by the real Dolittle Raiders, some of whom were executed after being captured by that Japanese. They didn't even have the decency to find the name of the real copilot who flew with James Dolittle... he gets credited only as "Dolittle Copilot". At least they did have the character of Doris "Dorie" Miller, a real hero of Pearl Harbor... The black cook who took to the 50 cal in the attack... but they barely followed his character, inserting him in as though he were out of place and not giving him the credit for all that he really did. I spent nine years in the Navy... I've been to the Arizona Memorial. All I have to say about this film is: It pissed me off.
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I found it quite interesting that the entire movie of Pearl Harbor was incredibly one-sided. Though yes it managed to focus on both sides of the attack (Japanese and American), it included a terribly blatent patriotism attempt. If you look throughout the entire movie, it is quite humorous, actually. When the Japanese are bombing the Americans, old ladies, young females, children, and even PUPPIES (yes, that is right) are being shot at by heavy artillery. Wow. Can you see ANYTHING else that would be so incredibly obvious at demonizing the attacker? It gets even better when the Americans go to bomb Tokyo and not ONE single child, old lady, mother, or puppy is shown to be shot at. In fact, not one single person is shown dying when we bomb them in the Doolittle raid.
Now, I usually don't complain about patriotism and corporate America. But this time it seems that the movie industry has slept with Uncle Sam one too many times, and they blatently tried to demonize the enemy and turn us into heroes. I hate to break it to all of you "sheltered" Americans, but YES, we DO kill innocent people, and YES, it isn't as sugar coated as this. I was ashamed of this, but hey, I might just be whining.
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
We let the Nazis (not just the "Germans") kill 6 million non-Jews too. Don't hear much about them, eh?
There is more than enough culpability to go around. Let's upgrade it to recent events: Have you protested the Taliban's requirement that non-Muslims be identified by a mark on their clothing? Did you take to the streets or even call your congressperson when Africa began (and continues to) chopping itself to bits with now over 5 million dead in ethnic and tribal cleansing?
Guilt is like Peanut Butter: It spreads a long way and sticks to EVERYONE. So what will YOU do today to stop the bloodshed?
RMW
flames > dev/null
Well, at the time Radar was in it's infancy and the data wasn't always reliable and the techies had problems getting the military to believe radar reports were accurate. Over in the UK, which at the time had an even more pressing need for good radar detection systems radar still could not be relied upon to give accurate data. If you want to find out more about this, I reccomend you check out Arthur C. Clarke's ( yes, *that* A.C.C. -- he was involved ) Glide Path. It's one of the more interesting accounts of technical culture meeting military and management culture that will still strike a few resonances today. The technology changes. The idiots don't.
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
One member of our group (we saw it on Saturday), during the attack scene, was about to ask the gentleman behind her to please shut up already until she realized what he was saying:
"Yes, that's how they came in."
"Yes, that's just the way it looked."
"No, they didn't hit that."
"Yes, I remember that."
The rest of us didn't hear this story until dinner. I wish we could have asked the vet how he felt about the movie.
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No one bothered to mention one of the most important elements in a historical/period film--costumes.
They made a *BIG* oops... They got the women's skirts, curls, and lacquered nails correct. However, men in the 1940's did *NOT* wear their pants at their waists. Look at your grandfather. He wears his belt at his chest because that was the thing to do back then. In this movie, all the men, both on and off duty have their pants tailored like it's 1999.
Shame... shame... shame...
(I won't discuss the other parts of the plot since well... that's pointless.)
As for the comments on the movie's historical accuracy as far as plot, you're only half right. The movie tried to blend (but still couldn't make it work) lots of random events from history into the movie. When Kate Beckinsdale's character yells "To the hospital!" That's done, of course, so that you can see the savagery of the attack on the hospital. (Yes, it really did happen. See the previous post about the pock-marks.) Mr. Miller was included for the previous reason. The nurse got pregnant because that was something that happened a lot back then. (Although don't tell conservatives that.)
Give them some credit. At least, they never mentioned Stalin, Hirohito or Truman as central figures in the attack.
Yada yada yada.
--Al
If you're going to insist on putting spoilers in, you're going to ruin it for those of us who haven't seen it. I want to find out for myself whether the japanese end up attacking.
Waitaminnit... Michael Bay? Didn't he direct Armageddon? With Jerry Bruckheimer producing? Spoil all you like. No way am I going to watch it.
Personally, the intro fighting in SPR bugged the crap out of me. It was cinematography with a blunt instrument.
I enjoyed The Thin Red Line far better than SPR.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Aw dude, that's so 80's... ;)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Wasn't it lucky that not a single carrier of ours was sitting in Pearl Harbor? USS Enterprise, Yorktown, Lexington, and others.
I love the movie Midway with all those great old actors like Peter Fonda's dad and Tom Selleck. I'd rather
see that movie than this Pearl Harbor. We'll probably see a remake of that soon, I'm sure. At least we were able to not only find that sneaky Japanese carrier force, but we sank a few of theirs.
But I already know what happens: we get bombed!
(This is my only qualm about war movies. Sorry, I have other qualms too, but Vonnegut better addresses them in his intro to Slaughterhouse Five. Read the book.)
-Leo
Hmmm...I had a great uncle die invading Norway (German army) and two great uncles die in the pacific (US Navy and Marine Corp). Just like the US Civil War, there were families fighting on both sides and the majority of soldiers were upstanding, patriotic citizens, doing what they had sworn to do (obey orders, etc.). While I did not agree with all the reasons we were in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield/Storm, I did my duty to my country and worked my ass off, because I had taken an oath and stood by it.
I drank what? -- Socrates
To be honest, coming from the Midlands in England I feel that the bombing of Dresden was justified. Five years before Dresden the Germans started bombing Coventry. The first raid was approximately 5/7 of the destructive power of the Dresden bombing (500 tons versus 700 tons). Dresden lasted two days (February 13th and 14th 1945) whilst the bombing of Coventry started on November 14th 1940 and continued until August 1942. By the end there had been 41 bombing raids and almost 4500 homes destroyed.
Yes. Almost 4500 homes destroyed. Civilian targets. Between five and three years before Dresden.
I grew up with a concrete wasteland, thrown together quickly in the 50s and 60s in an attempt to rebuild the city. Perhaps that is what most Americans don't understand. When you know that things are how they are because someone flattened an entire city, you don't really see why you shouldn't do it back. That is the way war is. You attack someone then you are going to get attacked back.
I seem to recall that in the mid-1980's the US sent a carrier battle group up through the (North) Atlantic in the middle of a gale (hurricane?) to sneak up on the Soviet Union to do some fleet exercises. When the dust cleared the USSR went ape-shit when, without warning, they found US Navy AWACS, F-14s, F-18s and Intruders flying a dozen miles off their coast. This even caught several NATO countries off guard.
The USSR protested against "US aggressive" behaviour and some Allies immediately asked that the US tone down the exercises because the USSR got very very nervous and began responding with sending high alerts to Warsaw Block forces.
Let's not forget that most wars are usually started by "a surprise first attack" and that tensions between Japan and the USA were extraordinarily high in 1941 -- probably about the same level as were the tensions between the USSR and the west in the mid-1980's.
183 minutes? That's over 3 hours! They should release an abridged version with just the part where the US gets the crap blown out of them, that's all people want to see anyway.
I really miss the older geek crowd who grew up William Gibson and the like. all I see these days are little punks who listen to Korn and saw the movie "Hackers" and have morphed themselves into some kind of media-acceptable stereotype. I miss the days of pale geeks with commodore 64's, 300 baud modems and phreaking... *sigh*
Go Dixie Flatline go.
EOM
This puts in context the fact my grandfather just turned 79 (served for 3 yrs during WWII.) that would have made him 20 when he first experienced death on a grand scale.
Being 23 right now myself, I can't imagine how different I would be if the last 3 years of my life had been spent fighting for my survival instead of working for a internet startup. Somehow I think working late nights to try to get things up and running by a deadline is nothing compared to the death march at Bataan.
I wish these movies were more introspective and personal, so that some of the torment and history of the situation would be more accessible to the normal schmuck watching films. I think a good example of something in this vein would be the book "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"- something that is inside someone's head, focuses on mundane things but gets the horror of the situation across perfectly to the reader.
Of course, when you spend 130 million on a movie, I guess someone is going to want to get that back and then some. all hail the almighty buck.
EOM
that what we are seeing is important and that everything changed after Dec. 7, l941. This Pearl Harbor is so busy signalling its significance that it's like being trapped in high school history class.
BilldaCat
You said brother! Shrek was surprisingly very good and 10x better then Perl Harbor.
-slams
1. Catch a matinee. Like pretty much any other movie (with the exception of Shrek and The Dish), don't pay full price for the crap that Hollywood stuffs down our throats. It's just not worth it.
2. If the movie starts at 2pm, walk into the theater at about 3:20 for the start of the battle. Trust me, you're not missing much before that part, and the battle is really quite incredible. For the next 55 minutes or so of the battle, you should get your money's worth. The bombing of Tokyo isn't as exciting, and Baldwin's portrayal of Doolittle is cliched and, frankly, stupid. Doolittle was a smart man, and Bay's made him look like a melodramatic ass.
As far as love stories intertwined with historical tragedies go, Titanic was a better movie. Much better.
--Bernie
And try not to let your overly-pc mind cause you to fail to get the joke (yes the much over-abused "Launch every zig for justice" thing)
The one thing that this movie did NOT do was to portray ANYONE as the bad guy. This film went to great lengths NOT to become a propaganda film to say: Japan, bad - U.S., good. Unlike the films of the 40s and 50s, this film tried to present the Japanese point of view and treated them fairly considering they had to play the bad guy role in the film. Call it revisionist history if you want; remember, the history books are always written by the victors. The real truth is usually some place between two opposing points of view.
You don't even know the truth about the Gulf War and that was little more than a decade ago and occurred in an age of technology. Some people have to fight to find the truth and balance the views of both sides. If it is so easy to know the real history... to know the truth, why is it people still get convicted for crimes that they do not commit? The answer: because the truth is based on facts and facts on evidence. Ultimately truth is determined by the fact finders and the fact finders are fallible. In many cases, history is what you choose to believe it is. If someone discovers new evidence that can question the facts, are they then a revisionist? Give me a break. Keep you pennies and do your own research and Lord forbid anyone challenge the status quo!
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
Ummm....hate to break it to you. All the movies you mention are FICTION. That means that nobody thinks it really happened that way. You might also notice that Red 5 didn't really blow up the Death Star using the Force.
It's a fun movie. If you want a history lesson, read a book. Start with Admiral Bull Halsey's biography. Then read Patton's book. Numerous coffee table books do a decent job of imagery of the men and materiel, and there are numerous discussions of tactics and strategy in WW2. Go see Pearl Harbor because it's a fun movie. Don't make it be anything it's not.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Dammit, the history book I read says he blew it up with the power of his mind, causing the hamsters at the core of the battle station to spontaneously combust. You can't trust ANYBODY these days...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
There is a underlying truth here tho. World War II, pacific theater is inherintly a Psychalogical War. Pearl Harbor itself was meant as a blow to the American Moral. Despite what a few revisionist historians think, before Pearl Harbor, no Japanese thought that America was simple going to roll over. The size of the battle put them into a bit of a delusion (as did their successes with the Langly, Singapore, Phillapenes, etc). Anyways, I stray from the point.
Dolittle's raid is critically important because it knocked the Japanese command off of their high perch, and made it so that they tried to both continue their downward path (into australia) and to finish up a ring of defensive islands. Corel Sea blocked the advance into Australia, and Midway blocked the defensive Island pass.
Important note, both of these battles were fought without any new equipment at all. Both of them in terms of the greater land wars were realitivly small battles. (A million people died in a single battle (Stalingrad) in Russia.
Once America entered the war, they built up for the more conventional war in Europe, and then started to focus on Japan.
When the tatics that had developed in Europse started to be applied in Japan, it was even more devestating. Make no mistake, Japan was defeated and out of the war in 1944. They refused to surrender, even when most of their cities had burned to the ground, they fought on.
Have you ever looked at the plans for Olympic etc? (Japanese D-Day style). Really not pretty. Rather then go ahead with that, they decided to use a nucular bomb. Bear in mind Tokyo had already been burned to the ground in a attack that was far more devistating. It was a pure pych shock that ended the war. I for one, am very glad not to have had to invade Japan.
"There was racism and stuff;"
Like this!?
Sorry, but if your introductory paragraph contains mistakes that my brother knew to avoid in fourth grade, what sort of credibility are you trying to establish?
Just look over the article once before hitting submit...
The equation you and many before you draw is Invasion Deaths > Atomic Deaths. Putting aside the fact that this is 1) speculation and 2) been convincingly refuted, you have to keep in mind that in wartime, soldiers are paid and trained to kill and die for their country. If it takes a million soldiers to "win" then that's what it takes. That's why you have armies and strategy and generals and a whole lotta soldiers. If you can't win on those terms you shouldn't be able to win. There is no moral or ethical justification for premeditated killing of noncombatants, whether it's one mother, or hundreds of thousands of mothers, shoppers, nurses, musicians, drunkards and heroes. And yet the refrain: but we would have lost too many troops! It is the most cowardly strategy.
And we have never owned up - Germany, Italy, and Spain never stop agonizing or apologizing for their roles in this most bloody century, but we are serene...
+++ Chromalon.
don't make comments without watching the movie first. this was most certainly mentioned in the movie. before the attack had begun and right when they were realizing shit was going down, they tell the naval commander that "one of our ships just sunk a japanese sub coming into the harbor"
after rereading your post i realize you meant "ignored by our navy" not "ignored by the filmmakers"
that most certainly is interesting to note.
James
THis was actually a very good and accurate review by Katz (/me waits for all the Katz bashers to jump on the bandwagon).
I totally have to agree with you there. IMHO, Katz is generally a raving idiot with an amazing knack for restating and restating the obvious, but this time, he's told me everything I wanted to know. I've read a few reviews of this movie, all written by people who review movies for a living, but this was the best one I'd read. Nice job to Captain K.
What's your damage, Heather?
.. the only thing we walked away with from that movie was all the wincing and uncomfortable feeling in our stomachs at the thought that that Anti-American, communist, military hating asshole playing the all time greatest Hero Of the Air Force - General James H. Doolittle.
The worst part is now that whenever i think about or hear about the great things that General Doolittle did - i will have a mental image of that whining tree-hugging loser in my mind.
I wonder - he *HAS* to know that we all know that he HATES us.... and so i can't help but believe that in playing this role is a way to just piss the hell out of us.. every time we see the movie....
oh well.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
/*The real, live breathing men in uniform were both Air Force pilots*/
minor nitpick, but it was the still the Army Air Corps then.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yes I know that's an anachronism, from a time when videogames meant arcades where you paid only 25c to play for a few minutes of joy. But those were insightful, historically acurate minutes that digested all of WWII into side scrolling shooter extravoganzas.
Jon Katz himself needs to brush up on his history. Couple of mistakes on his part:
but Naval officials unaccountably ignored the flight formations it was picking up in the hours before the attack.
No, they didn't *ignore* the formation per se, but instead believed it to be a formation of B-17s due from Midway. The B-17s arrived in the middle of the attack.
Also, the United States was not a reluctant bystander. Rather, it was pretty much an Allied power at that point, through such activities as the Destroyer Deal and the Lend-Lease program.
Otherwise, though, it seems as though he knows more about history than the movie's director. Oh, and Titanic wasn't that historically accurate.
One of the major reasons the US dropped the nukes was to intimidate the Soviet Union. The real start of the Cold War was the dropping of these two bombs. When did the apparent Cold War start (meaning, when did the public begin to notice)? During WWII peace talks. You know, the Soviet satellites, Berlin occupation, etc.
So those 12 children I saw in National Geographic who had missing left arms are completely normal, right? The radiation didn't remove everything after their elbows, did it? Even though they're not dead, they still weren't affected by Chernobyl, eh? Maybe they're all part of a 6 year-old cult that cuts their arms off and mysteriously sews it all up.
The Hollywood History of the World by George MacDonald Fraser
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Any movie about the pissant bombing of Pearl Harbor should also show the amazing "punishment" that we doled out to the Japanese. Millions of innocent civilians getting fried to a crisp. It pretty much dwarfs what little the Japanese were able to do to our Hawaiin base.
First of all, your numbers are wrong. About 200,000 Japanese died in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Predicted casualties in the case of an invasion of the Japanese "home islands" were in the millions (for each side).
Yes, the bomb killed lots of people, but many more would have died if it had not been used.Two other facts you don't often hear:
Before the bombing of Hiroshima, the US dropped leaflets warning citizens that the city would be destroyed, and telling them to evacuate.
Even though there were three days between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese did not surrender during this interval. Even after the second nuclear bombing, the Japanese war council wanted to continue the war. They were overruled by the emperor. Most people simply don't understand how committed and determined the Japanese were. You have to study battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa to really understand the WWII Japanese psyche. They were incredibly ferocious warriors, and it took the seemingly-magical powers of the atomic bomb to make them surrender.
Oh, and does it show the US concentration camps for US citizens that happened to be of Japanese descent?
Oh, fuck off. The film didn't show the American treatment of Japanese-Americans (which was a shameful atrocity), but it also didn't show the Japanese treatment of foreign nations (which was far, far worse--instead of concentration camps, try prison camps with forced labor and high death rates among prisoners). The movie was already 3 hours long, and none of that was relevant to Pearl Habor, which, if you didn't notice, was the title of the movie.
I am alive today because the Americans used nuclear weapons on the Japanese in WWII. My grandfather served in the occupation forces in Japan. If the bomb had not been used, he would have been in the invasion force, where casualties were expected to hit the 50% mark.
I was going to flame you for posting your ignorant drivel that dishonors the memories of the men and women who died for your freedom. Then I realized you probably just don't know the truth, and that it's not really your fault. This history is unfortunately not taught in American schools anymore (or so it would seem--I'm not American, so I don't know).
As a final note, I haven't yet seen this movie. Long before it was released, I could have told you Jon Katz would review it negatively, simply because of the subject matter. Consequently, I have no way of knowing if his review is accurate or not. I would appreciate a review from someone less hostile to American patriotism (and less whiney) before I make a decision as to whether I should see the movie.
I partly agree with you - the Nazis were the bad guys, but I don't think you can say that membership in the army or air force precluded them from being Nazis. When you consider that the Nazi leadership publicly stated their aims before they were *democratically elected*, I think there's plenty of war guilt to spread around the majority of Germans of that generation, and serving evil in uniform is still serving evil.
Now I do believe that there were many Germans fighting in WWII who were trapped by circumstances they didn't choose, and the bad guys were the Nazis, but I think you have to consider just how many Germans were Nazis, and pause before you absolve the German armed forces of their guilt.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
.... Very few Americans know of the Tokyo raid towards the end of the war that killed around 100,000 civilians (more than were killed in Hiroshima or Nagasaki).
not as much as japanese army killed in NanJing, so what exactly is your point again?
nobody is begging you to apologize okay. We chinese has some way to get back at you, leaking something missile technology to north korean, for example. Look, the japanese young generation can be ignorance about the WWII and we wouldn't care a bit. Nobody is longing for your petty apology.
(and you ae right. this is not about fair. and this is not about truth either. this is about what we think it's fair. Well at least we don't shooting it out like the goons in isreal.
-tino
True political correctness means being morally responsible to all sides involved, not modifying the truth to accommodate popular regional tastes. If the movie needed editing for the Japanese audience, a politically-correct person just has to wonder how accurate/responsible the American cut is.
BTW, to me, there's no such thing as being too politically correct. The fact that the term has been co-opted by the anti-establishment media, and twisted to mean "lacking integrity for the consumer's sake" is a shame. Not offending people without reason is just common courtesy.
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
I saw this movie on Friday when it came out. I have to disagree about the author's opinions on the acting. I believe the acting was superb, but the plot sucked. Not only was the first hour and a half somewhat boring (some of us were joking about using our lighters on the screen if we had to put up with much more), it also had no historical significance. The name of the movie is Pearl Harbor, not Lets Watch Ben Afleck Make Out With His GF. Therefore, I have to say I WOULD see the movie again, but walk in an hour and a half through it. Last, What was up with the Doolittle raid part added? We were allw aiting for it to end, and then bam, another 45 minutes!
the bombing of pearl harbor was, even though katz rails the movie for it, one of the defining moments of us history. if not for pearl harbor, the war would've gone very differently for all parties involved, as the united states would not have joined until later.
now, i do not agree with the film's message of lovey doviness, in lieu of actual history, but it's still important to show it. we can't forget our history.
after all, how touching would that scene of peace had been, had pearl harbor never had happened? and how much more touching will it be, to a new generation of idiotic kids who will never understand pearl harbor, because they were able to see ben affleck portray it?
you want movies of peace, but for that, you have to have movies of war. i would like movies that treat important movies as important, instead of fodder for affleck. you have to deal with that, because there's no point in actually having wars, unless people remember them.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Nazi doesn't even apply to all Germans in WWII. The name Nazi only really applied to those who chose to join the Nazi party. In the war, the 'Nazi' army were the SS, who had a different uniform (and a different attitude) than the regular army. (I think that 'brownshirt' was the nickname for the regular army). As such, most people of German blood are able to walk away from the Nazi name -- even historically.
On the other hane, Nip is (and was) used as a racial and racist slur. People are called 'nip' for no reason *other* than being Japanese (or at least vaguely japanese-looking). Non-orientals are *rarely* called 'nip'. for *any* reason.
Koreans are especially injured by being called 'nip'. Historically, Koreans have far more reason to be angry at the japanese than americans. Unfortunately, many people who use the 'nip' moniker use it on anybody who looks oriental.
Thus 'nazi' is a moniker which which is usually "earned", while 'nip' is endured by anybody who is born to certain parents.
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
According to the rules of war/diplomacy, you actually tell them that you're comming, just now where, when and how. THe rrules of the time were that you had to give so many hours notice in a declaration of war before your first strike.. (I don't remember the exact ammount of time. It was 2,6 or 8 hours). Given that the Pearl attack took place at 8AM on a Sunday in Hawaii, the notice would have been given at an early hour on a Sunday morning in Washington. ....
Waking up the proper people, and getting the news out early on a Sunday morning was a problem that the japenese depended on. As I remember it, Pearl Harbour depicts the notice of war sitting on some (sleeping) bigwig's desk in Hawaii as the attack starts.
The Japanese crew of Tora! Tora! Tora! made a big thing of the fact that (oops!) the attack took place 5 minutes too early for it to be outside the quiet period between the declaration and the first 'legal' attack. Being sticklers for formalities, they seemed to consider this a big 'no-no'.
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There's about 30 mins of action in the middle, the rest is a soppy romance. There should be some standardisation of trailers to warn people of these things in advance.
Yes, they showed the LOTR trailer last night too, and it looks damn good.
Umm you don't use "whom" as the subject of a noun clause.
You also shouldn't capitalize "class" in English class.
Additionally, "Or better yet have obviously-heavy things dropped on them" is a sentence fragment.
However, I do agree that Katz is a pretty piss-poor writer.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
But people really didget their heads blown off of their shoulders. Hollywood doesn't have much excuse to not make it accurate.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Yeah, but George Orwell shouldn't talk. I've read 1984, and trust me, the real 1984 was almost NOTHING like that.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Actually the quote you quoted was takin out of context. He was reffering to how the movie pertrayed the US. Read it again
I agree there is nothing positive in the review about that American generation, sacrifices, etc but holy shit man, the review is of a movie not American History!
And if you read the first paragraph its satire if not sarcasm on how the movie makes all the men of that time look like Affleck and the land beatiful before the war makes us ugly, smelly complicated, dark and dismal. Do you read everything so literal?
As for Katz, he is smart and a great journalist. You read his review and commented on it a few times didn't you? I bet you 2 beers some of his "opinons" are not what he thinks, they are what he thinks people will react to the most.
Ok I can live with that ;)
/. with out it going violent. Just like old /. times.
Its great getting into an actuall intelligent discussion on
Mechanics are not trying to prevent normal people from driving. On the other hand, big business and corporations try to prevent any one from being a mechanic.
Which big businesses? Which corporations? All of them? Generally I find most big business already produce pretty complex products, and none of their efforts to make things easier for people who don't have or want the ability to learn vast quantities of specialized knowledge mask the internals of their OSs for those who know the guts of what they are doing.
Linux is not an installer,
Linux is an OS of which an installer is part. According to common usage. Its a kernel too, but the common usage (on this site and most other places too) is as an OS.
What a red(mond)-neck.
Christ. You think that just because I criticise Linux I use Windows in my day to day work? And you know what they say about assumption?
What a weak pathetic little fool.
s there a lot of revisionist history going on in this one? I'm not going to spend a single penny on it, but it would be interesting to know.
I don't know, but after U 571 and Saving Private Ryan, it wouldn't surprise me if the film was another pro US self contratulatory backslapping session, passing itself off as historical and pissing off a lot of people who know it to be severely factually incorrrect.
Given the curent relationship of the rest of the world and the US right now, I'm surprised someone's decided to show this in Australian cinemas, and predict that locally, it will die a short death.
You didnt talk for shit, :-) but I'll spell it out for you.
That's not a sentence either (and you call *me* a redneck),
I talked about Open Source developers often failing to realize that most people do not know or care about the internals of the machine
=
"Mechanics shouldn't be the only people to drive cars..."
you ranting that the big evil corporations who eat orphans take away that control
=
"On the other hand, big business and corporations try to prevent any one from being a mechanic."
Simple, isnt it?
Yes, and its exactly what I posted. You don't quite seem to undertsand it though. That's okay, you seem a little simple yourself.
Er, no. If the article is titled `how to Install Linux'
Yeah but the title we are talking about is not "How to install linux, in this case we will use Redhat Linux", it was just plain "how to install linux".
Yes, exactly, you stupid fuck. I have never talked about an article entitled "How to install linux, in this case we will use Redhat Linux", I have spoken about an article entitled how to install linux" which mentions in its introduction that it will be Red Hat based. Read what I write before you respond.
if they are comparing Linux with Apache and Windows with IIS, then they are comparing apples and oranges
In your opinion. But based on the fact that most comparisions are of the Windows + IIS to Linux + Apache type, most people would disagree. This is good thing, as you are an idiot.
Apache is more then likely going to communicate and use the kernel and less of any additional changes that redhat Debian or any other distribution would make.
Complete sentences. Please. You can if you try. I believe in you.
I have a better example of what is misleading.
I do too, there was this time at band camp, where...wait! That doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with this agument at all!
Have you tried every distribution's (or in your words "Linux kernel based OS"'s) installer before,
No, and my statement is not misleading. I have tried every distribution with an installer considered remotely usable by just about everyone. Gregs I Wrote This in My Back Yard Linux distro is of no concern to me. Find me a distro you consider easy that I haven't tried.
since you tried one or a few then they must all be the same?
One or two? Linux is my career. I've tried about fifteen distributions of Linux and more of other Unix-like OSs.
You certianly know how to dance around an issue, I'll give you that.
What? I said work, you made a mistake and thought I meant `workplace'. Admit it.
WTF does this have to do with me calling you a red(mond)-neck?
Its a response to you telling me that of course you didn't know what I used in my workplace. I illustrated the difference between work (verb) and workplace (noun).
And you still keep calling me a Red(mond) (ba boom ching!) neck despite the fact you know I don't flatly prefer Windows to Linux.
Be a man. Use your account.
Ok, for a second let's assume these ridiculously high figures environmental organizations like to show off are true. Say that 20 000 people have died so, far, and perhaps 80 000 more will die in the next 85 years. A total of 100 000 people in 100 years. Compare this with the 200 000 europeans dying each year because of air pollution resulting from energy production. Me, I'd rather have nuclear power..
It's not entirely a coincidence. _Barbarossa_ wasn't a particularly great idea, nor was its execution; and the diversion of large amounts of rail transport to moving around prisoners probably didn't help the wartime logistics effort any.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
We didn't know the Nazi's were killing the Jews.
America was not the global superpower we are now and was recovering from a depression. War was the last thing American people wanted.
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
America played as big a role as any other European country in winning the war, casualties be damned. We're not stopping them from making movies about their heroes.
Like it or not, America was a HUGE part of winning WW2 - whether Europe likes to admit it or not.
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
"unconditional" surrender is the only way to end a war. If we agreed to conditions we would still probably be fighting the war in some form.
Okay, a lot of people note that Pearl Harbor is NOT historically accurate. What movies are historically accurate? I heard Tora (good classic war movie) is pretty accurate. Any others?
:).
Thank you in advance for replies
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
From what I've read, the movie is actually being shown in Japan, but it has been altered because "it made the Japanese look like bad guys."
Is there a lot of revisionist history going on in this one? I'm not going to spend a single penny on it, but it would be interesting to know.
What is with all the conspiracy theories? Jesus people, learn to just STFU now and then. Most of the posts modded up to 4/5 are complete bullshit, wacked out conspiracy theories being told by people who don't even know anyone who was in the war, while people who DO know war veterans and have heard first hand accounts of what when on are being ignored.
WTF? I like conspiracy theories as much as anyone, but gimme a fucking break, listen to the people who actually know what they are talking about.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I don't know if Roosevelt KNEW of the attack or not, but the signals were certainly in place. However, one thing which is often not mentioned -- in the late thirties a US Navy exercise explored a carrier battle group attacking Pearl Harbor, in a virtually exact situation as to the Japanese attack. The 'attack' was conducted by several waves of mixed type bombers, on a Sunday morning, and it was brutally successful. The after action reports recommended air coverage for Pearl, barrage nets strung from barrage balloons, and the separation of Battleship Row and airfield parking setups to minimize collateral damage. None of these things happened.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Additionally, the Allies won a war that was started because their nations were invaded, which makes pretty much all their actions justifiable.
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"After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling" - The Onion
As a point of order, we were breaking Japanese diplomatic (JN-25?) and naval codes on a regular basis prior to Pearl Harbor. Magic and Purple were two decoding devices. However, just prior to December 7th the encryption keys were changed and we didn't figure them out again until December 10th (?).
By Midway (June, 1942) we were pretty much reading everything.
I remember this because I just re-read "Midway: The Incredible Victory" by Walter Lord (Wordsworth Military Press), but I don't happen to have the copy with me so I can't go into detail.
I'd like to see a movie about the millions of people including armed Japanese civilians, women and children in addition to soldiers on both sides, who would have been needlessly slaughtered if we didn't use the Atomic Bombs. Imagine the families hidden in the mountains and foothills continuing to fight a hopeless fight because their leaders told them to, being killed one by one simply because they couldn't give up. Boy that would make one hell of a gory saga.
Hmmm. It doesn't sound much better than a movie about nuking people either. Maybe we could do better by accurately recording and remembering the past WITHOUT second-guessing the people who were actually there having to make decisions without the benefit of knowing exactly what would happen if they used plan A or plan B.
It seems like the true lesson of course is that the whole messy business of full scale warfare is probably best avoided as much as possible, then finished quickly if it does occur. An accurate portrayal of the Pearl Harbor attack would show this better, but then of course people would actually KNOW the truth and it's much more profitable to make a movie entertaining even if it's not historically accurate.
I read on usenet "It's a one hour battle sequence cleverly hidden within a 3 hour chick flick." That seems to sum it up pretty well, and we would do well to remember that the movie was written for entertainment, not for historical realism. If it was the whole truth, you'd see it on the history channel not in a theater.
You raise very good points. However, there is certainly some good to be done with taking a bit of artistic license. If the story can be made that much more entertaining, it can reach a wider audience, which could inspire some people to go out and actually (gasp!) do research on the subject.
Increasing interest in some important issues, such as the Holocaust, or Enigma, or WW2 in general, can be a Good Thing (TM). (It can also be a Bad Thing(TM).)
I don't think that history is rewritten ENTIRELY for greed. Some of these people may simply want to find a good story to wrap history around. Some of the details may be changed, but hopefully the general idea gets through.
Now, having said that, I think Pearl Harbor was rather poor. I can believe Disney rewriting history to suit their money-loving tastes. I really doubt Spielberg would do such a thing purely for greed.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
"richly-imagined imagination"
With descriptors like that, both Katz and whomever taught him should be dragged into the literary streets and flogged with a thesaurus.
Or better yet have obviously-heavy heavy things dropped on them.
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
...and besides that, there's nothing wrong with communism, anyway. Even though I really can't believe many braindead Hollywood actors actually knowing anything about anything political.
______________
______________
OTTERS RULE.
The details have changed, but entire carrier battle groups still can and do "lose" themselves at sea. For all the wonderful air, satellite, and ground-based surveillance we have today, the challenge of tracking and identifying ships and aircraft at sea remains a daunting one. Oceans are big. It's hard to appreciate just how difficult a task it is until you've stood watch as Force Over the Horizon Targeting Coordinator (FOTC) for a battle group. The fog clears, and you realize that no matter how perfectly they may have been executing Soviet battle tactics and formation, the "Orange" (exercise enemy) task force that you just had half the air wing WASEX (blow away) was really an Icelandic fishing fleet. [True story, Northern Wedding '89]. But then you take comfort in realizing that the neither the Orange fleet nor the Red (real) Bear-D's have found you, either, as you approach the relative safety of the Vestfjord.
Nor is it all that hard to sneak aircraft past radar. For just one example, send 'em through in welded-wing formation, in the dark, on the expected track of a commercial flight, and there's a very good chance you'll get in and out before anyone wakes up.
And thanks to great animation, it's one of the first movies to give us the bullets and bombs' point-of-view, from the planes right into the ships and hangars.
"So bomb, how was it for you? good run?"
Hmmm... I think this computer animated perspective stuff has gone a bit far...Reminds me of Dark Star more than a little.
Actually this is semi-accurate. I can vouch for this as I just did a report on the Enigma. For some good reading check out the transcript of a show nova did about it at www.pbs.org/wghb/nova (search for enigma). The poles did give England one of the original Enigma machines before the US entered the war. However, German high command added another rotor to the machine and the workers at Bletchley Park were again out of luck. Alan Turing figured out that the Germans were using tables to configure the machines each day, but they did not have this table to decode German intercepts. It was an American ship that captured a U-Boat and gained these tables.
Braveheart....
The Patriot....
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
The filthy critic is just foul-mouthed rather than witty. If you want funny, check out Mr. Cranky. His Pearl Harbor review is here.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
I'm amazed that you'd actually try to seriously cite IHR for anything.
my one consolation is that i didn't pay for the movie ticket.
My father was in London during the Blitz, and was shot at by the Japanese in India and Burma.
That said, he will be the first to admit that many of the Germans were normal people caught up in a war, just on the wrong side.
I recently watched "The Longest Day" with my seven year old. He asked me who the bad guys were. I tried as best to explain that the bad guys were the Nazis, not the Wermacht or the Luftwaffe.
Stand Fast,
Stand Fast,
tjg.
Not everywhere a person loses all his rights when doing a crime.
Being a big WWII buff, I had to see Pearl Harbor on opening night. I will be the first to admit that the movie was not very accurate but it will do one thing, bring those who sleep through US History up to speed. It was a hell of a day, and the movie did a good job at pointing that out. On the other hand they did read their history books. I saw the correct Japanese Flag, and they mentioned that a Zero could run down a P-40 (well, nothing could catch a P-40 in a dive at that time though) Funny that they mentioned the Air Corp presence in England, but not it China (ie, Flying Tigers, thought that might have tied into the storie a little better).
Yes. These movies are "entertainment", bad as they are, it is about money not history. I Think Katz is on the mark (I saw enough in the trailers). The movie doesn't rate even TV. I skip all of this type. -quasimoto
It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really fly with me. Use a computer long enough, and you get used to a 104-key keyboard, fersure.
Despite my tender age of 26, I learned how to type on a manual typewriter... and there is a remnant of that in my style. I go through at least one keyboard a year.
The History Channel is running specials on WWII "this week"--how does this make it any different from any other week?
It's too bad they haven't made a movie yet with modern CGI that tells the story of Pearl Harbor from the Japanese side.
A good movie about the taking of Singapore would also be interesting to watch, if it was well-done.
...When in doubt, think for yourself.
If you want to go all the way back to the dawn of time, you could probably find ancestors in anyone's past that participated in atrocities. But we're talking about 60 years ago, not the dark ages.
Perhaps you should take your trite dismissals of war crimes and argue them before the thousands of "comfort women" the Japanese took from Asia. In case you're not familar with the term, that's when you abduct girls so they can be repeatedly raped by any of your soldiers that feel the urge.
While you're at at, maybe you can argue before some Jews that the war crimes of the Nazis were just the regular sort of hegemonic bugaboos. Happens all the time, nothing to get upset about.
But please, make your case face to face. That way, you could learn a painful lesson about the laws of natural selection you so enjoy spouting off about.
I'd be more interested in seeing the Japanese reaction to Nanking than Hiroshima. You know, that Chinese city where the Japanese let loose their soldiers like a Mongol horde and tried to rape every woman they could find?
I'd also be interested in seeing their reaction to all the bayonetted boys and raped women in the Phillipines, which they labelled the "Southern Resource Area".
If I was a Jew, I'd most fear being occupied by Nazis. If I was from any other group, I'd prefer being conquered by the Nazis to being conquered by the Imperial Japanese.
Thanks to the Jews, we all remember the Nazi's war crimes. But there's no equivalent to the Jews for the Pacific conflict. Certainly Japan has never recognized it's responsibility for the war in the same way that Germany has.
So you won't hear any complaining about Hiroshima from me. After what the Japanese did to civilians all across Asia, they should consider themselves lucky that we only nuked their cities one at a time.
P.S. More people died in the conventional bombings of Tokyo and Dresden than died at Hiroshima. And 10 times more would have died in any conventional invasion of Japan. Remember, we're talking about people that had to be nuked twice to get the point.
Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941.
Quoted Slashdot Review: May 27, 2001.
Fifty years? Try sixty.
It's people like you that make movies like this possible. Bruckheimer is the Poison of the movie industry - Lot's of glam, no soul, less challenging than the maze on a Pizza Hut placemat.
free online diet tracking.
The movie itself was a lot like Saving Private Ryan, in that the big battle scene was an excellent way of showing how horrifying war can be but the rest of the movie was fairly mediocre. One other problem I had as I watched it was the bizarre and erratic combination of true historical references and total fiction. A handful of characters in the movie were real people, a handful were composites of real people, but it was never clear which those were. Same goes for a lot of events; it's impossible to tell what really happened and what didn't, but the very existence of true events in the movie leaves one predisposed to find it all accurate. Like some others have commented, I find that troubling, especially because in this day and age lots of parents take their kids to such movies because they are "educational."
Read a book, damnit. :-)
Pearl Harbor isn't a frickin documentary, IT IS A MOVIE! If you want to see the truth about what happened watch A&E, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel or read up on what happened. If you honestly think you'll be getting a history lesson by watching a hollywood I've got a bridge in Brooklyn that I'll sell to you.
"The film should have been content to bring us the story of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor..."
What would be the point of going to see the movie if is was only about the attack?!?! Every person past the 4th grade should know what happened at Pearl Harbor! The movie was meant to ENTERTAIN the audience.
The screenwriter is clearly going for another grand-scale Titanic...
Why compare Pearl Harbor to a movie that is in a different genre? Are you stupid? That's like saying: "I like the color blue more than the taste of a steak." (makes no sense)
"Military historians say..."
Who the hell cares what historians say? I know veterans that were there at Pearl Harbor and said that everything was targeted. Not just ships and plains.
If anything this movie was to remind us of what our Veterans went through. That is the reason why this movie opened this weekend.
The generations of people that fought World War II are definetely the greatest generation yet and this movie shows why the United States is a great nation.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
What do you mean you are "quite" certain? I'm "quite" certain several people died from choking after swallowing their dentures in the last forty years. Shall we outlaw dental work as a result of that? Several people died from heart attacks while playing golf in the last forty years. Shall we outlaw golf? Several people died from stepping on a fallen soap bar while bathing on the last forty years. Shall we outlaw baths? Several people died in church services in the last forty years. Shall we outlaw churches?
Maybe someone died while moderating a Slashdot post in the last forty years. Shall we outlaw Slashdot moderation?
In war, nuclear weapons accounted for about 0.5% of all the victims of WWII.
In peace, there was one fatal accident in more than forty years of nuclear energy use, with thirty people dying of the radiation and four others dying later of cancer (source: "Science" magazine, April 20, 2001, vol. 292, number 5516, page 420, "Nuclear Radiation: Living in the Shadow of Chornobyl", by Richard Stone and others). There are a number of other fatal accidents in the nuclear weapons research, whose death count is unclear due to military secrecy, but I would count those as "war", not "peace", victims.
Now, which human activity is as safe as the peaceful use of nuclear power? One, just one, fatal accident with thirty four dead in the course of forty years certainly is not "a lot of dead bodies".
That is, fifteen years after the Chornobyl accident, there are just FOUR confirmed deaths of cancer from radiation exposure. And we are talking about the most closely monitored population in human history.
is computer game-playing teaching people that unless things are exiting, explosive, with people dying, a movie is boring?
that's what i read from the review.
my dad flew in wwii, mostly to meet girls. and he met a lot.
his mom was very down to earth, very homey, always baking bread and keepig the house clean. it really was a simpler time.
i hope that one day humanity learns to survive without the need to kill or blow things up for excitement, and two people can look into each other's eyes, with a smile and anticipation, without that being "boring" to the viewer.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
People want to be entertained. People also want to be informed. I paid $5.50 at the movie theater to watch a film and I didn't pay a cent to watch a network television program on Pearl Harbor. I going to remember the love story from the movie, but I will remember the historical parts (where they actually bombed, that the US force didn't have any planes in the air, that there are at least 900 people still buried in the Arizona) for much longer and will have a more lasting effect for me.
We are fine being entertained, as long as we know the difference between fiction and non-fiction (which these movies do make confusing). My teachers in High School used films to support historical events, but I remember being told that the movies might not be accurate and we are free to expand our knowledge ourselves using the resources there are.
I must admit the attack scenes were really well done, but I think they could have done a completely accurate attack and still be able to have the two actors do what they did.
No-one ever said we had to rely on Hollywood for our history lessons.
People are complaining about the historical accuracy of the movie, but this leads to an astounding implication:
We take our history lessons from hollywood. Full stop. If you watch movies to learn, your reality becomes a victim of tricks used to put bums on seats in a cinema. Please open a book. Then again, how can they be believed either?
And there, folks, is the reason history repeats itself. Now I'm thinking maybe Nixon really was an arsehole.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Actually, I was referring to the /. crowd vs common masses. WE are able to decypher what is hollywood and what is history - but regular slack-jawed yokel american may not.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell, "1984", 1948
I've never seen a place where this quote is more appropriate. Yes, *we* know that the films are historically innacurate, but say 20 years from now, or 50 years from now, will common people go to history books, or something that is *EASY* for them to watch. It can almost be said that Hollywood is subconciously rewritting history.
Yeah. That's civilization. Throw a guy in the can because he was threatened and took action to stop the threat.
What do you do when he doesn't surrender?
And SHOOT HIM IN THE FOOT??? I've been a cop for pretty much my entire adult life. I've been through just about every defensive-tactics class my department would pay for. I've been a police firearms instructor for some years now. And I know how big a target the feet/knees/arms are. There just isn't any way to hit them reliably when they're moving, and they're hardly reliable stop points even when they are hit. The only reliable target is center of mass.
Self-defense law in my state is a recognition of an unpleasant reality: Some people are just shitbags, out to do whatever they want and profit through the victimization of others. We (police) try to do everything we can, but sometimes we can't get there in time and people need to do what they can to hang on until we do get on scene. If someone shoots an intruder, we'll detain him while we investigate, but if he legitimately feared for his own safety neither we, nor the prosecutor, nor the judges, nor the public would fault him for using force to protect himself.
It's all about trust. We're willing to take the chance and trust that our citizens know their responsibilities and take them seriously. You'd be surprised at how often that actually works.
"well accepted by historians" well then!
could we possibly see some sort of references or something for this? Maybe it's common knowledge, but I've certainly never heard it before!
Far better than Pearl Harbor OR Tora Tora Tora is the 1953 film From Here to Eternity. Nominated for 13 Academy Awards and winning 8, it deals with military life in Hawaii up to and including the attack on Pearl. If you don't rmember how great this film was, see http://www.filmsite.org/from.html If you haven't seen it, rent it!
Ah....but who will Moderate the Meta Moderators?
well, if we're going to show the "amazing 'punishment'" that the Japanese got. We might as well show the amazing punishment that the people of Korea, China, the Phillipenes, and countless other Asian countries received from the Japanese. Any time you're looking at a war, attrocious things happen. Just because we like to focus on those events that injured us doesn't make us wrong. I'm sure the residents of Japan, Germany, Britain, and etc are more likely to see dramatic movies about what happened to them, than what they did to their enemies(i only speculate on the last fact, but if i'm wrong, i'm sorry for assuming).
-Aaron
How do you know ?
It's OSKAR S. Sigh. So much for *beep*. S. List was as accurate as a 3 hour movie can make it. The original survivors were roped into help the actors playing them be "method".
Also, the landing craft in D-Day are piloted by men of the Royal Navy _and_ the US Coast Guard. On exactly who is that fellow that delivered one of the two boats that took US 2nd Ranger Battalion C Co to Omaha Dog Green, who knows. So even if you can guess the nationalitiy of the coaxswain using the few words that the actor uttered in SPR ("30 seconds!"), it does not really matter.
I am not defending Hollywood's regular butchery of historical "truth". But give credit when it is due. Criticizing such details is petty.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Mod this up!!! Just because somebody can't take criticism... geez...
good, so long as you admit that there's nothing wrong with killing hundreds of thousands of civilians is ok, as long as they are not US citizens. sigh... what the hell is the matter with you...
good, I better not hear another American advocating human rights or other hypocritical bull crap. It all comes domn to America and your damn empire!! Let any one that's not a American be damned...
true enough, but does it really matter if the amount of nukes is measured by the # of times they can bombar the surface of the planet?? I'd say 1 time is enough and 2 times is for backup...
AMEN brother, if I could mod you up to 20 I would.
>>>
I know that history is written by the victors but where does is say that it should be rewritten 50 years later in the name of greed? Is this what they fought for?
sums it up quite well, That's why I only go to theatre to see movies like T2 or any science fiction movies or comedies, anything that relates to history and is 99% not accurate should be lynched. It's a total insult to history and human intelligence, then again, a bunch of monkeys drop their $$ to see that, passively thinking they go to bed smarter with a good history lesson... hey if it's on the screen, it must be the Truth....
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Actually, it was not predictable, except for the part at the very end. They pretty much took the story wherever they wanted, with the end goal being the only waypoint. Sort of like O Brother Where Art Thou.
It's a predictable paint-by-numbers Hollywood flick that relies on the musical score to pretend it's an epic. To count the yawns, flaws and laughable moments would take days. Save yourself the misery and watch Shrek again.
Pearl Harbor did not justify really justify any retaliatory action from the US during the war. However, comparing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any way to this is completely misguided.
:-) This is quite unlike most of the rest of the world, where, especially during WWII, battles were fought in city streets and the general public was witness to it firsthand.
War is ugly, and a dirty business to be sure. It shouldn't be left to be fought soldier to soldier. It shouldn't be detached from the lives of the populous. If the general public cannot see the ugliness and brutality, then the politicians [spoken: largely non-military] WHO MAKE WAR will be more likely to pursue aggressive movements, simply because they themselves haven't seen it, or been directly affected by it. EVERYONE SHOULD FEAR WAR. The US hasn't been attacked at its borders or had war in its lands for a really long time. At least long enough that nobody alive today has seen it.
I am too tired to write about why I feel that the nuclear bombings of Japan saved so many lives. The truth IMHO is simply that Japan was fully committed to Asian and Pacific domination, even after the fall of the Axis powers.
The war in europe ended on May 8, 1945. V-E day (Victory in Europe) is what it is referred to now. V-J day (Victory over Japan) didn't occur until August 15. Yes, war wtih Japan continued for just over three months. In desperation you had Japanese using Kamikaze tactics, inflicting tremendous casualties on US troops and resources. It was probably the consensus of the US govt to follow the european victory with a strong stroke against Japan in hopes of ending the war as quickly as possible. Consequences be damned. The US public probably felt great relief at the fall of the Nazis, but the war didn't end there. We [all non-Axis...] had fought the war with them for so long, that the public would've felt relief, when in fact there was more work to do. The govt and military wouldn't want anyone going soft on the idea of finishing the war outright. This is something that apparently happened with the extraction of Iraqis from Kuwait at the end of Desert Storm.
I remember hearing somewhere that the initial target wasn't either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but another city. I forget the name, but it was known as their spiritual center. It was considered that this was a poor choice for a target, due to the fact that it could seriously damage Japanese culture and even possibly prevent Japan from EVER agreeing to surrender. Even after the first bombing, Japan was unwilling to quit.
I suppose in a simplistic way you could compare it to boxing. Each fighter would much rather get a knockout and end the punishment of both sides if they can. No boxer wants to go 12 rounds every time they step into the ring if they can help it.
So no, I don't share your opinion that the Manhattan Project was such a terrible thing. It was an ugly but necessary piece of the war. It was designed for use against the Nazis, though, as they were the much larger concern for nearly the entire war.
Also, accelerated nuclear research and has given us good things despite the bombs.
sedawkgrep
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
...for nearly a century the embodiment of technological hubris and human fate, bravery and tragedy.
Is Katz talking about Pearl Harbor or Perl Harbor?
"Perl 6 will give you the big knob." -Larry Wall
Isotope separation and bulk transmutation have given us little more than a huge pile of insanely dangerous radioactive waste and a lot of dead bodies.
Not that many dead bodies, compared to conventional weapons in ww2. It's also given us a lot of energy.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
PURGE THE WORLD OF MORONS!
Unfortunetly, I've been having trouble killing them, so I just flame them instaid.
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Is the kind who insults people smarter then him
Go read a history book, dumbass. The US did get a few plains off the ground. Keyword: few
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
For example, in the War of 1812 where New England not only did not contribute to the US cause, but actually committed treason and cooperated with the English. Even called a secession conference in 1814...only Jackson at New Orleans and the Virginians/Marylanders in late 1814 saved the day.
Worse was 1861-65...worse than WWII and I combined for the US.
And of course, was the 1866-78 or so crusade against the Native Americans....
Innocence lost >100 years before WWII...and perhaps even before 1775-83....
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Lawrence of Arabia
KFG
Well yeah, they did a lousy job of picking targets.
Other than THAT the raid was brilliant.
KFG
Some of it dosn't stick.
The midget subs were an experiment that didn't work. Modern war is a time of outrageously accelerated technological development and "alpha" versions are tested in actual combat.
This has nothing to do with the overall strategic quality of the attack, and even damned little to do with the overall tactical quality of the attack.
KFG
you can watch Midway.
Rent these two and see four times the movie, at 10 times the quality, and half the price of a single first run ticket for Pearl.
KFG
on Pearl aired last night to plug the video release of Tora! Tora! Tora!
" Well of course it was a sneak attack, you don't exactly call the enemy up and let them know you're coming."
" Maybe it's just my Southern upbringing but I was always told that you attack the enemy in greater numbers and when he isn't looking. The Japanese did a fantastic job militarily."
The American military, right down to the lowest gob, was not so much stunned by the perfidy of the attack, they KNEW it was coming sometime somewhere, but rather by the increadible ease, competence and SKILL with which the Japanese pulled it off.
The "infamy" was to sell the war to the public.
KFG
These comments were made by surviving *Americans* stationed on battleships during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
"history is written by the victors" - Hermann Goering
For whatever the observation of the origination of the quote is worth.
KFG
In all fairness, I believe that the majority of the reviews I've read about this movie are completely reversed to what all was wrong with it. Yes, the love story thing was slow, the dialog weak. Still, the first 90 minutes had stuff happening and lead the audience into a wee bit of the pre-attack history. Had they polished up the dialog a bit, that lead in could have been a movie all alone, at a savings of $140 million of wasted CGI effect.
The crime of this movie was that attack scene itself. With Bay's super fast cut editing, all the CGI effects were totally wasted. Stop and consider why Private Ryan's D-Day invasion was so powerful. The camera simply sat still for a while, allowing the audience to take in the scope of what all was happening. These were real people being mowed down before you, and you felt it.
Bay managed to remove any emotional attachment you might feel towards the men aboard those ships. Halfway into the battle, it's just booms and bullets. You might as well just spin a kaliedoscope around really fast, you'll get the very same effect. If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing out on what amounts to a 40 minute strobe speeded collage of images that apparently had something to do with the US entry into WWII.
If you like sparkly things that don't mean anything and won't have you feel anything, you will absolutely love that battle scene. If you're willing to suspend belief far enough to buy the notion that the Japanese military wasted tons of ordinance on civilian targets while enjoying a 98% hit ratio on the military ones, unless of course our heroes are inside one of them, you'll love this movie!
Personally, I'm trying to look up some reference to why we don't tar and feather movie makers for desecration. I sure can't think of a good reason after seeing this crap.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Not true: They were not suing for peace. The fact is that the Japanese were split - the military wanted to continue the war, the civilians wanted it to end. The civilians, not the military, were probing for clarification as to what "unconditional surrender" meant but no way had anyone sued for peace. It wasn't til we dropped the bomb that Emperor Hirohito felt compelled to side with the civilians. Even after Hirohito sided with the civilians, there was an attempted coup that was bent on preventing Hirohito's surrender from being broadcast.
While it's true that FDR's call for unconditional surrender made it harder for the Japanese to surrender, it's not true that the Japanese were suing for peace prior to Hiroshima. If the bomb achieved anything, it made it very clear to Hirohito that Japan had lost the war and that his generals had lied and were continuing to lie to him. Hiroshima made it 100% clear to Hirohito that if the war were to drag on, the Japanese, not the Americans, were going to lose even more. In his surrender speech broadcast on August 15, 1945, he says:
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Hirohito probably knew the war was over when Curtis LeMay destroyed Tokyo that spring but it took Hiroshima to get him to act on that knowledge. I'll take Hirohito's word as to why he surrendered over any revisionist historians.
The term "unconditional surrender" which gave the Japanese so much trouble, came from FDR at Casablanca. Truman didn't come up with terms at Potsdam; he stuck to FDR's Casablanca position articulated much earlier in the war. The July intercepts you refer to do not support your contention that the Japanese were suing for peace. They underscore the point that the Japanese were trying to figure out how to end the war on more favorable terms to them. Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to it. Hirohito says as much in his Aug 15 broadcast.
To answer your rhetorical why you suggest that it was Stimson's fault. According to your lights, Stimson doesn't want to go to Leavenworth so he convinces the U.S. to continue the war so we can use his bomb? That's a hell of a stretch. The simple fact is that FDR laid out a course of action and the War Department was implementing it. They weren't second guessing or flip-flopping on prosecuting the war. Make no mistake; the decision to enter the war was Hirohito's as was the decision to end it. Not Truman's, not Stimson's, not Grove's, but Hirohito's.
As to "needlessly killed 200,000 civilians..." Truman's staff was telling him to expect somewhere between 500,000 to 1,000,000 casualties if we invaded Japan. Given that choice, most rational people would make the same choice Truman did - drop the bomb and hope Hirohito stops the fighting. Hirohito didn't sue for peace until Aug 15th, 1945.
Rhode's book has a picture that shows an imperial palace surrounded by bombed out Tokyo and there's a photo of a top-hatted Hirohito touring the damage. Even LeMay dropping death on Hirohito's doorstep wasn't enough to get Hirohito to quit - like it or not, it took the Bomb.
Japan narrowly avoided becoming a colony, due to some swift and decent leadership under the Tokugawa Bakufu, and the timely coming of the Meiji(spelling?) Restoration, which restored the Emporer as the civic leader of Japan, rather than the ceremonail/religious. As part of the Restoration, Japan decided it really needed to modernize quickly.
They did, with a lot of help from the British, who were sympathetic to another island-based empire.
It was primarily British built battleships that the Japanese used in the 1905 war with Russia (in which, btw, they sunk the Russian Pacific Fleet, sailing into their harbor about 5 minutes after Moscow got the declaration of war.)
Japan joined the Allies during WWI, and during/afterwards was considered to be a rising Pacific power.
I _think_ it was the Treaty of Versailles that dictated how large the major powers could keep their militaries, in a ratio with the other major powers. I seem to recall that Japan got 3 capital ships to the US, Britain, and France each getting 5.
The Japanese took this as an insult, and thus ignored it.
After WWI, the rest of the world gave up on colonialism, whereas Japan was just getting started.
There were also issues with Japan, with a military coup attempting to establish themselves as the civil authority, much like the Bakufus of previous generations.
Adding to the mess is a split within the military itself, whereas the army wanted land -- specifically China; and the Navy wanted to expand through the Indies, the Philippines, and so forth.
It was moreso the Japanese naval expansion that got on the nerves of the United States, and we applied diplomatic/economic pressure on Japan, attempting to curtail their efforts -- specifically cutting off steel and oil.
Again, Japan considered that an insult, and realised that their Pacific expansionism would cause conflict with the US.
The best Japanese admiral -- arguably the best of the war, Yamamoto was _strongly_ against going to war with the US, because he didn't see how Japan could win against the US production might.
However, he was overridden, and was forced to come up with _some_ strategic plan that might work.
His take was grabbing and establishing a defensive line in the Pacific; and dealing a knockout blow to the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
And that brings us to the movie ...
5 paragraph summary concluded.
you just described my life.....
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Do you seriously think that everything was a conspiracy? War IS a terrible and ugly thing, but despite the horror, it has always been and will always continue. Because of that, it is necessary to develop weapons that will ensure that you can hold out against the aggressors in the world. To try to be "utopian" and abolish nuclear weapons, as well as biological and chemical weapons, is insane and naive. True, they are HORRIBLE if used, but it is not the use of these weapons that gives them their power, it is the NON-USE. If you decide that we need no weapons of mass destruction, yet allow other nations to continue to develop them, you lose any cold war by default, and essentially belly-up to any serious threats in the future.
The truly useful accomplishments nuclear, such as filling out the Periodic Table, working out how stars glow, and MRI imaging would have been discovered without the Manhattan Project. Isotope separation and bulk transmutation have given us little more than a huge pile of insanely dangerous radioactive waste and a lot of dead bodies.
You seem to be forgetting all about nuclear power. True, most of the technology developed in the Manhattan Project, other than isotope separation and development of sub-atomic theory, had nothing to do with power production, the isotope production and separation were the largest hurdles to overcome. There is NO WAY that private industry could have ever been able to develop (in less than 200 years) nuclear power without the huge investments that the government made.
If you are so against isotope separation, then turn your lights off and watch your beliefs change. Nuclear power IS NOT nuclear weaponry. It is a shame that people still equate nuclear power production with nuclear bombs.
Remember, isotope separation does not create "radioactivity" nor does it directly lead to any weapons grade material (no, U-235 is NOT used in any current weapons. The package size is MUCH too large for the yield achievable, and don't go citing from the FAS)
Memo to people bitching about this movie:
Oh my gosh! You mean Armageddon wasn't totally accurate either? And the nerve-gas in The Rock? You stupid fucking jackasses! It's high-budget big-summer movie Hollywood entertainment. Its goal is to make large piles of money, and they'll twist any facts and whore anybody they have to to do it. And people will line up by the hundreds and pay their $8.50 to see it.
Plus, it's billed as fiction . Yes, I enjoy a good historical drama as much as the next person, but I also like to see fictional stuff in which lots of shit gets blown up. Any mongoloid idiot who went to Pearl Harbor to see an exhaustively-researched work of impeccible historical accuracy needs to have the stupid beaten out of them. Or at least they should have the dignity not to bitch about it in public. In any case, get over it...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Since the entire economy of a modern nation is geared to produce the tools of war...
Wow, where do you live--the Klingon homeworld?
I just saw "13 Days" yesterday and I was asking myself the very same question: To what extend is history rewritten or modified in order to be able to sell the movie to box offices.
My conclusion is that 13 Days is a bad movie, but a good portrayal of the sequence of historic events. It didn't have all the excitement of the cuba crisis I was told about in highschool. It's not a box office biggie, allthough I think Kostner, aside from the southern accent which doesn't really fit him, does a modestly good acting job at times. The movie lasts about 2:20, but I think it could have been done in much less than that. Not that I was boored but at times you'd expecty the politcal conflict to keep building up. That doesn't happen because historic elements keep softening the tension, so presumeable, the filmbuddies tried to romantisize this epic without damaging the historical plot too much. Of course JFK is the great american hero in this one, but unlike all other great heroes, this one actually IS smart, he doesn't just look it.
The other characters in this movie, aside from the president and his advisors, are so thin it's hard to keep watching at times. The Chroetsjov side doesn't get any attention in this movie, and maybe that's a choice to make, but it might have added some intersting elements. The whole movie is tangled into speculations which just don't bring enough adrenaline to say this is a good movie. Too many characters play too little parts to mean anything to the plot, so it's hard to sympathise with anyone else but JFK himself. The main character is the historic plot though, and I think they did everything to keep it from going off the track.. of course politics is politics, and things might have been a little different, but we'll never know.
Anyway, I've had enough of historic war-movies for a while, I think Hollywood should look at something more creative to sell. Schindler's List is undoubteldy the greatest movie in that genre and it's going to be hard to beat that one. Certainly not with 13 days, and certainly not with Pearl Harbour, a typically semi-heroic American movie, for the american public, but with enough action sequences to lure the rest of the world in buying a ticket anyway.. well it might be entertaining, maybe..
On a side note, it appears that some genre-films are allways appearing in pairs, what's up with that ?
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I've heard that our Pres. at the time wanted in the war to do some good. And that clues pointed to a Japanese attack in the general area around the general time. And that our major ships, that should have been in dock, were strangely away. Discuss.
The death camps were a surprise to the soldiers who took them as the war came to an end. They shocked everyone. No one know that genocide took place until the war was over.
The british didn't kill anyone en-mass, but they do exclude, as every country does, the crimes their men commit during war. Every country has many soldiers guilty of the robbery, murder, and rape of other nationalities. These things happen.
P.S. The Japanese were known for treating POW's badly during WWII. They believed in Bushido, in which it's better to commit suicide than be captured. They thought poorly of those who would surrender and applied their bushido ideals to our men.
And if you weren't so gung ho on the British cheering section you'd know that the first working Enigma machine in possession of the Allies were machines built off designs bought off of a disgruntled German by French intelligence agents. Maybe we should be cheering the French now? Pfffft.
That Ben Affleck's character has just returned from Europe having fought in the Battle of Britain and incarceration in a prisoner of war camp is completely laughable, just as the idea that Ralph Fiennes injured character in The English Patient would be transported back home to Britain via war-torn Italy.
Its easy for us to watch movies and laugh at what seems to us to be obviously contrived situations but in reality, crazy things happen every day, especially in warfare. If you didn't know their names and somebody told you the stories of guys like Greg "Pappy" Boyington, Eugene Bullard, or Chuck Yeager and tried to pass it off as fiction, you'd laugh at the unbelievableness of it. But fact of the matter is crazy screwed up things do happen and precisely because of that, similiar stories make for good entertainment.
You must live a pretty dismal life, always having to write movie reviews, and always finding the movies so abysmal. Kind of like being a food critic for small-town diners, I suppose. I'm sure that you don't complain just to be cool, and show that you're more artsy and sophisticated than the rest of us, though.
I haven't lost hope, despite your lack of success in finding good movies. I'm still confident that some day you'll find a movie you like that doesn't have a "geek" in it.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
If you think I'm full of shit, respond and I'll put up a whole bunch of primary documents, etc.. as well as a report on the bombings on my website.
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Shit, feel free to disagree with me, but quite honestly, I can say, without reservation, that this was the best movie released in 3 or 4 months.
If anything, nights tale would be the thing that you described.
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I always thought that PHP is perl harbor...
Well, well
There can be no room for PC revisionism , really, and certainly bombing population centers into the Stone Age is a horrific business(and I mean that in total sincerity), but we're also not talking about the age of smart bombs and super technology, either. When it was a choice between Hiroshima and Nagasaki or landing an invasion force where they -knew- that the allied casualties were going to be astronomical? Yes, we used those bombs, perhaps for nothing other the very honest reason that we valued our people more than we valued the enemy.
In the stark realities of Us v Them, you wind up with choices like this--and we are *damn* lucky that we never had to use the bomb again in a wartime scenario(nuclear testing is a whole different can of worms). We should also be very careful to seperate the events that led to the Cold War from the Manhattan Project. Stalin wasn't a very nice guy and killed 10 million of his own people, afterall.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
There is a difference between men who faced each other in combat and men who were held in brutal captivity by sadists.
Warriors or soldiers face each other in battle and often kill each other. They do this because they must, because their respective nations demand it.
Lester Tenney and Simon Wiesenthal were soldiers captured in combat who were subject to beatings, near starvation and torture because it gave pleasure to some prison guards. If those guards were soldiers, they dishonored themselves and the uniform that they wore.
My uncle served in combat in Vietnam, and speaks of the Viet Cong with respect on the few occasions that he talks about the war. His enemy fought with honor and bravery and cannot be faulted with anything.
The Japanese flyers and sailors at Pearl Harbor did nothing wrong. They conducted a daring and decisive strike against great odds (many Japanese planes were shot down too, especially in the 2nd wave) and won a partial victory. The only reason why their victory was 'partial' and not complete was the US carrier task force was at sea.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You completely lack any sense of perspective or any knowledge of human behavior.
Modern war is a awful horrible thing. Since the entire economy of a modern nation is geared to produce the tools of war, everything is a target. The only means by which such a war can be ended is by complete eradication of a generation of fighting men (ie World War 1) or the complete destruction of a combatant (ie the Confederacy during the US Civil War, Germany and Japan in WW2)
The total destruction of cities and centers of production are terrible. The human cost is horrific, but that is what modern warfare is.
Ironically, the nuclear weapons that you abhor so much are the tools that will prevent a conflict on the scale of WW2 from ever happening again. The cost of a global, nuclear conflict are so high that such a conflict will never happen again. (Until there is an effective countermeasure against nuclear weaponry)
After 55 years you are happy that we are wasting billions developing advanced weapon systems that will never be used. If the threat of those weapons was not present, millions of us or our children would be casulties in yet another 'Great War'.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You are totally wrong your first two both. Go read your hitory book again.
The strike on Pearl Harbor was a tactical strike designed to take out the capital assets of the US Pacific Fleet. (namely the carriers and battleships) The Japanese wanted to build their asian empire without interference. They took out the British Asiatic squadron in Singapore a month later for the same reason.
Dolittle's raid was completely irrelevant. It served as a moral booster to the American public and little else.
Coral Sea & Midway were the decisive moments of the Pacific War. Coral Sea blocked the Japanese feint towards Australia and Midway sunk the core of the Japanese carrier fleet, along with the elite pilots of the Japanese Navy.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
AND... I had family that worked on the Titanic, I was born in Belfast and the story of the ship was taught in schools and survivors appeared on local TV from time to time. In all of that NOONE ever called the damn thing "Titanic" - it's "The Titanic".
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Well, when there are lots of adult witnesses who didn't mention it and only one child that "remembered" it years later I think we're quite safe in thorwing out the outlying data point and keeping the rest.
It seems pretty clear that the ship split on the way down, but how far down is hard to know.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
As you can tell from this article in The New York Daily News.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
see the subject line. it's another good retellign of the events of that day.
"One man's "magic" is another man's engineering."-- Robert A. Heinlein
Forgiving people who killed your friends may or may not be an admirable thing, but I disagree that it is simply the right thing to do. Certainly, from a psychological perspective, it may be healthier to forgive, and from a day-to-day functioning perspective, it may be more pragmatic to forgive, but I don't necessarily agree that forgiving is always morally superior to not forgiving.
Consider Simon Wiesenthal and Lester Tenney (POW, survivor of the Bataan Death March, author of "My Hitch in Hell). Both men are still pursuing their tomenters decades after the war, and neither has 'forgiven' their enemies. After reading their accounts, I wouldn't blame them nor would I judge them. Certainly, if anyone has earned the right to unrepentedly hate someone else, they have. If either of these men should ever forgive those who torured them, I would support it. But only because I thought that it helped the men come to terms with their experiences for themselves, not because I think it makes a moral whit of difference.
One of the world's first radar stations had just been constructed in Hawaii, but Naval officials unaccountably ignored the flight formations it was picking up in the hours before the attack. Today, satellites and electronic surveillance would have made any such stealth impossible.
The same radars, intelligence and all the spy satelites in the world didnt help the US to realize that India was getting ready to test its Nukes underground. So does that mean, that even now, a small determined nation could crept under the shroud of electronic surveillance and sneak right in to the enemy's backyard and plant a surprise ? It sure seems possible.
Rapid Nirvana
There is no wide acceptance that Roosevelt knew about the impending attack. He was trying to get us into the war with the Nazis, not Japan. He had no reason to expect the Nazis would make the foolish decision to bring us into their conflict once we were fighting Japan. There is some reason to believe he knew, but it's far from proven or accepted.
q: what do you get if you take a bunch of English people and send them to another continent and let them stew for a while? a: Americans ;)
we're all human, all citizens of the world, and we're all the *same*. these sorts of arguments seem to try and prove the contrary. that's why they never get anywhere.
1. all but 3 ships were repaired and returned to service.
2. the ships they sunk were mostly out-of-date WWI battleships (useless).
3. the American navy was already building the next generation of fast cruisers and carriers which would defeat the Japanese navy.
4. they didn't hit our fuel dumps, shipyards or carriers. hitting these would have crippled us far more than losing the ships we did lose.
brilliant psychological victory, piss poor strategic outcome. overall...one thumb up, one thumb down.
Well, I apologize for basically claming that you were being racist if you didn't mean to be. On the other hand, I don't apologize for flaming you. It was not at all clear that you were referring to aircraft rather than people. The adjective "Nip" could have referred to the country, the pilot, the Japanese in general, a company called "Nip Aeronautics" which manufactured the craft, or just about anything else. Really, the phrase "Nip aircraft" is not the least bit clear. However, in my experience, the word "Nip" is almost always used as a racial slur (on the rare occasions when it's used at all), not to refer to aircraft. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the insult "Nip" is just a derogatory use of that word once used (more respectfully) to refer to the Imperial Japanese Navy, but not anymore. That's why someone flamed you for your choice of words, and why I said you were talking like you were in the past. "Nip" just really isn't used to refer to aircraft anymore.
May I recommend that next time, you say "Japanese" instead of "Nip"? That way it's 100% clear that you're talking about the planes, and clarity is an important part of writing.
Is this post by the same guy who wrote those other posts? Dang, slightly different writing style there.
You need to understand something about my "hyper-sensitive PC proclivities". It's not about "sensitivity", it's about "respect". I actually give a damn when someone else gets hurt (say, by an insult). Some people (not necessarily yourself - I do mean "some people I've met") seem to feel like attacking my beliefs because they interfere with the casual racism, sexism, homophobia, or whatever that these people have gotten used to. They also seem to dislike free speech when that speech disagrees with their beliefs (i.e. "Shut up you PC thug!" when I point out the slurs they're using). I consider these people to be jerks, and still I say something when they speak up.
In my posts, I'm trying to claim that nowadays, "Nip" is almost always used as a racial insult. This is the "context" I was referring to ("here and now"). As best I know, other people think of "Nip" as a racial insult too. Just because it was used another way in 1941 doesn't change how it's used now. This is why I thought "Nip" was a racial slur (This is also why using the word "Japanese" would have been much clearer).
Like I said in my other post, I apologize to you if you were falsely accused of posting a racist remark. I assumed that you thought of "Nip" as a racial slur, and that you said something racist. Apparently someone agreed, since I was not the original poster who commented on your remark. I don't apologize for getting confused by a confusing remark, or for speaking my mind. And I'm sure you're not apologizing for speaking your mind either. Fair enough.
The most unfortunate thing is that Bay and Burkheimer prostituted the pearl harbor vets to promote this movie, and it turns out this movie has nothing to do with honoring their memories at all.
In short, this movie is a poorly contrived/clicheish action/love/special effects movie that has absolutely no meaning unless you're one of the brainless moviegoing sheep that feeds the Hollywood coffers (sorry if i offended anyone, but this is true).
What is not known to many people was that the Japanese had guessed correctly the first part of the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been on the southern end of Kyushu, code-named OLYMPIC.
Sadly, it would have been a bloodbath on both sides; the Japanese had the same defensive emplacements that caused so much trouble in Okinawa, only on a much larger scale.
It's small wonder why the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war.
This movie was made by Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, two of the morons responsible for "Armageddon." It's no suprise that both movies have that "bastard child of a comic book and a soap opera" feel to them. For once I agree with Katz, this movie stinks. What bothers me the most was the way that they used/abused the real people involved to pump their garbage movie. The movie's depiction of historic characters is wrong in most parts and downright insulting in others, I don't see how they managed to sign on so many people connected with the real battle to help push this movie...
Well I hope I don't make you feel any worse U.S. involvement in WW2, but the Nazis (please don't just say "Germans") didn't start killing Jews en masse until the war turned against them.
*sigh*
Did anyone else notice that the Doolittle Radiers' B-25s were taking off from the deck of a Nimitz class nuclear aircraft carrier?
If those Warhawks had taken off cross field like that they *probably* would have ripped their landing gear off.
No one ever leads aircraft in movies anymore. Sigh.
I wish the movie would have done a bit more about the Japanese. From what I can remember from history class, the Japanese lost major face in regards to the attack: -due to a transcription/time zone error, the Japanese embassy mixed up the hour of the attack. THey were supposed to deliver an official declaration of attack at the same time, Hawaii time, except in DC. But they were late by 1 hour. Many of the pilots who flew that morning were horribly disgraced and dishonoured, having attacked while not officially at war.... I believe some committed ritual suicide? Interesting.
It seems that americans, and some europeans even think that USA's part in WWII was very big. This comes mostly from watching american war movies that are almost all about american soldiers.
However for a realistic view of their input, compared for instance with the soviets, you can veiw the casualty numbers from the war:
WWII casualties millitary and civilian
I'm not saying USA's part in the war is little, just that they seem to make a lot more fuss about their part than nations that played a far bigger role in wining the war.
Sindri Traustason
"It takes two to lie, one to lie and one to listen"
Sindri Traustason.
You assume I'm a guy? No wonder why geek-boys like you never get dates ;-)
Yeah, they sure treated all those South African women and children swell during the Boer War, where 27,000 civilian prisoners of war died in concentration camps. If this is how they treated their fellow white Protestant Christians, you can only imagine how they treated their "enemies" of other races and religions.
When spreading out the borders of an empire, it will be within prudence to blur the lines of nationality, and let's be frank, opposing nations are rarely willing to simply accept new blood into their hegemonies. I'd be willing to bet that everyone in the world can find a similar event in their family histories. It's not pleasant, but there's little in the process of natural selection that is.
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{smack} Welcome to the concept of supporting forces. The French 2nd Armored Division all the way through France using American armor, American vehicles, American weapons, American ordnance, and serviced by American mechanics. The Canadian Army largely used British equipement. British supplies were delivered across the western front using American trucks.
The kicker is that in 1973, in a speech to the San Francisco Bar Association, Admiral Chester Nimitz (succeeded Kimmel as commander of the Pacific Fleet for the duration) mused on what would have happened had Kimmel had warning. He surmised that Kimmel would have recalled the carriers and sortied the fleet to meet the Japanese, where the entirety of the Pacific Fleet would have been sunk in thousands of feet of water rather than 60, and the losses would have been 10 times greater than what they were.
-db
I believe a total of four Warhawks scrambled against the first wave, but I don't know anything about the others.
There are lots of reasons to be annoyed by Pearl Harbor; I don't believe that the portrayal of the men who scrambled in the face of 80-1 odds is one of them.
-db
Holding out while besieged and isolated by the Werhmacht for weeks. Responding "Nuts" to the German suggestion that they had surrendered, what did they think they were doing?
If only they had some French help, who knew the terrain from defending it in 1940. Why, they could have surrendered very quickly.
If only they had some British help, they could have given the Germans half of Bastogne for "Peace in our time".
As it as, they just had their rifles and their training, and held off a few division of Panzers and PanzerGrenadiers.
I have to admit the Sherman tanks sucked, but only because if they were as big as Tigers they would have been far to big to ship across the Atlantic.
You may continue to insist that Japan was more than ready and willing to surrender under the right conditions, but to say they only wanted the Emporer to keep his throne is ridiculous. Japan wanted to set their own terms of surrender. In war, the victor sets the terms, not the other way around. We weren't prepared to pacify anyone else. It had been tried by most of the rest of Europe in regards to Hitler, and we saw the effects of that policy.
Japan had to fall, or surrender unconditionally. That was the only way to ensure peace, and discourage other nations from going after their own rages of conquest. The fall of Japan left two options: full-scale invasion, or the nuclear bombs. Given the loss of life and damage to Japan a full-scale invasion would have brought, the bombs were a better alternative.
Whether or not you agree with what I've just said, and you still cling to the notion that the US is a big bad evil throughout all of history, drunken on its own bloodlust, it doesn't really matter. The truth is that the US was considering two options, Invasion or Bombing; no others were acceptable to the administration. I'm glad they chose the bombs.
Perhaps if you, in all your vast intelligence, had been there, you could have caved in to the Japanese demands. Maybe the world would have been a better place. Maybe, just maybe, Russia would have never found the nuclear bomb on their own if we hadn't developed it first. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It is all too easy to sit back in the comfort of your chair, typing on your PC, in a time of great peace and say "ahhh! This is where they went wrong! If only they had done this, we would have been rid of such evil!", as if you are actually entertaining the notion that over 50 years later you can understand all the complexities and intricate interactions that make up reality, in order to predict a different outcome.
Gimme a break and spare us all your self-righteousness.
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-- russ
"You want people to think logically? ACK! Turn in your UID, you traitor!"
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Also remember the invasion of the Aleutian Islands on June 3, 1942. Which was more an attempt by the Japanese to prevent the Americans from using it as a base to attack Japan. Although, the entire campaign was pretty hopeless...(i.e. more planes were lost to the weather than enemy gunfire) and the only major battle was that of the Battle of Attu.
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Los Angeles: 1,000 suburbs in search of a city.
I'm getting more and more pissed at this... there WERE 2 pilots who managed to get into the air, and they DID manage to shoot down 7 planes between them... before you yell at someone about their mistakes, make sure you're accurate too...
Quoth the zombie, braaaaaaaains
So, USA is a extremely good country. USA good! Japan baaaad!
- ----
So, let's do the same with USA because of KKK! It's a very good way of giving people what "They deserve". Targeting civilians is an excellent idea. Killing civilians is good when it's made by USA.
Let's nuke Germany right now! They killed too many jews! Let's not forget about South Africa and the Apartheid. And Cambodia. And Russia. And China. And USA. And Italy. And Israel. And India.
"Let's kill everyone because we are good and they are evil". Yeah, right. Good people kill bad people, huh?
-------------------------------------------
You think Bill Gates is evil?
I'm aware of the numerous posts before mine regarding this subject, but I do have one thing to contribute, even if most of you don't get to see this since it's Monday: IF, and that's a big if, I happen to go see this POS, I plan on saying to my friends while leaving the theatre, "I can't believe we lost the war!."
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. -Friedrich Nietzsche
I was going to mod the parent up as insightful, but I think this remark deserves a reply. I think he meant to say:
Hope this clarifies it a bit.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
How so? I just saw it recently on TV again (it's a fixture on May 4th, Remembrance Day in the Netherlands), and it shows Oskar Schindler as a shameless opportunist for about two thirds of the movie at least. He doesn't realise the plight of his Jewish workers until the very last scenes.
I agree the movie may be somewhat over-dramatized, but the constant harping on the accuracy is getting on my nerves a little, not to mention the yahoos that say that Spielberg has no right as a Hollywood director to make a movie about the Holocaust (hint: Spielberg is Jewish for crying out loud).
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
There is not real confirmation of this, but many historians believe FDR planned Pearl Harbour to get America into the war. The evidence certainly points in this direction as the US had decoded Japanese coded transmissions well before Dec 7th despit what it says in the review.
Yes, *we* know that the films are historically innacurate, but say 20 years from now, or 50 years from now, will common people go to history books, or something that is *EASY* for them to watch. It can almost be said that Hollywood is subconciously rewritting history.
If history were so easily rewritten, then it would already be done many times over and we wouldn't know it.
Hmm... maybe it is already done.
What makes *us* (or *you* anyway, I'm kinda dumb) so much smarter than future generations? Or so much more shrewd or cluefull or discerning or whatever?
I'm guessing that future generations will be able to "call bullshit" as well or as poorly as our generation or any other.
All your historical accuracy are belong to Disney!
_ __
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People are quick to throw around that pc lable. But as long as we're on the subject of honesty, how do you feel about America's role in bringing the Chinese empire to its knees and forcing Japan to open its society or die? As long as we're being honest, right. Sure, the Japanese commited truly horrific acts, but mostly against China, then korea, and somewhere far down the list prisoners of war, and then WAY down below that, typing the message to break off negotiations by the hunt-and-peck method. Was the diplomacy decitful? Sure. All diplomacy is, well almost. Did we know their diplomacy was decitful? Yes. Pearl Harbor was a skillful millitary manuver. But it was also an awakaning. It showed america, and particularly the isolationists, that it was a big world out there, and while we might be the biggest kid on the block, we sure as hell weren't the only one. Turns out the world was a little bit different that a Shirley Temple movie, or a Horatio Alger story. This simple fact is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as every bit as bad as our (the US's) use of nuclear weapons was on Japan. But it was no worse. A fair amount has been made of what is not taught to the Japanese in their history classes. It seems they are not alone in their omissions.
Interestingly enough, the betrayal of the emperor and people by the military leaders in WWII has GREATLY shaped Japan's culture. Typically, the people fighting the war, the everyman, are pure, good, and probably conflicted, but bound by their honor. The people running the war, are greedy, petty and evil. People are the top, of both sides, are bad, people at the bottom, of both sides, are good. But lets look at the people at the top. In Japan, they had leaders who conducted show trials and swiftly excecuted some of the captured americans involved in dolittle's raid. McCarthur had show trials and swiftly excecuted some of the Japanese butchers who killed allies in the philipeans. Americans sentenced the Japanese officers responsible to prision. Americans let McCarthur run Japan. Sure, this is an overly simplistic, and slightly skewed, representation. But it's accurate enough to tarnish the gleam on that greatest generation pride.
But let's face facts, movies are for entertainment, not stern moralizing as a case study in being an american. But for anyone else that goes to a Hollywood movie expecting anything other than to be pandered to relentlessly and professionally, "YOU ARE LOST AND DRUNK, ask someone for assistance."
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
It just bares repeating. The japanese commanders, many of whom had lived and studied in the US knew that eventually the US would prevail IF we decided to fight. Yamamoto only guaranteed six months of victory assuming the strike on Pearl Harbor went as planned. He knew the resources and industrial might of the US was something the Japanese could not match. We could grind them down in a war of attrition. That was why the strike on Pearl was so important. Then needed to hand the US such an awful defeat that the people (isolationists who didn't give a shit about anyone else anyway) would demand peace. Pearl Harbor was almost totally a psychological attack aimed not at the navy, but the american public. The tactical nature of the strike was secondary.
As for Dolittle's raid. Well Sun Tzu would disagree. The Japanese mythos held that their homeland was protected. It was the chosen land, and they were chosen people. Dolittle's raid clearly contradicted this belief, cutting very deeply in to something the Japanese held dear. And quite frankly, for the movies and books that came later, it's makes for superb foreshadowing. That said, the industrial assets destroyed in Japan were not as easily replaced as our ships.
As for the begining of the end, the Japanese commanders would probably say it was when the United States decided to fight the War in the Pacific rather than cede Asia to Japan. The battle of Midway was an all or nothing gamble. If the Japanese prevailed, they might have time to gather their strength, and the US ability to project her power would be greatly diminished for some time. But to not take that gamble, was the end of the game. They were going to lose the war of attrition, they knew it, and they knew Midway was their last and only hope for something other than defeat.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I'm not sure that a Zero could outrun a P-40 in a straight-out race at the time, although the Zero could easily out-maneuver a P-40.
Here's a question. It's not a rhetorical question at all, but actually a serious one. Assuming that it is very difficult for Hollywood to create a movie based around a historical event (say, hypothetically, Pearl Harbor) without introducing some historical inaccuracies, would it serve to alleviate the problem if the movie itself identified some of the liberties it took? For example, if before the credits rolled, Pearl Harbor were mention the names of the actual Doolittle raiders, to tell the number of US planes that actually did get off the ground and intercept the attacking Japanese (and that, no, they did not play "chicken" with the Japanese fighters), etc.?
It would certainly be unprecedented, and probably difficult for many in Hollywood to stomach, but might actually earn such a movie lots of positive press. What do you think?
This is demonstrably false. Read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The Japanese knew it was over and were suing for peace. These overtures were rejected because of one word: We insisted on "unconditional" surrender. The Japanese government was holding out for a guarantee that the Emperor would retain his throne -- a condition which we granted anyway.
After the Axis fell the war could have been ended bloodlessly and quickly at any time had we demonstrated a willingness to bend on "unconditional" surrender. Instead, at Potsdam (boldened by our success at Trinity) we poised to break them. This had as much to do with sending the Soviets a message as it did with ending the war.
I remember hearing somewhere that the initial target wasn't either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but another city.
Kyoto, which had been spared from conventional incendiary bombing along with several other "pristine" targets. Secretary of War Stimson vetoed Kyoto late in the game when he found out it was targeted. Nagasaki wasn't a primary target either -- the original objective for Fat Man was Kokura Arsenal, but the weather did not permit bombing and Sweeney moved on to Nagasaki.
I suppose in a simplistic way you could compare it to boxing. Each fighter would much rather get a knockout and end the punishment of both sides if they can. No boxer wants to go 12 rounds every time they step into the ring if they can help it.
Every atrocity in war is justified in this way. Nobody ever enters a war they think will be long, costly, drawn-out, and vicious. The fact that people are wrong about this so often is a lesson our species seems unable to learn.
Also, accelerated nuclear research and has given us good things despite the bombs.
The truly useful accomplishments nuclear, such as filling out the Periodic Table, working out how stars glow, and MRI imaging would have been discovered without the Manhattan Project. Isotope separation and bulk transmutation have given us little more than a huge pile of insanely dangerous radioactive waste and a lot of dead bodies.
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Why were no other options acceptable?
The flaw in your reasoning is the idea that this position itself was acceptable.
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I'd love to -- really. I've seen pictures of it, and was brought to tears by the story of Sadako.
Are you offering to pay my airfare?
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According to Rhodes, the US was intercepting messages between Tokyo and Moscow about using the Soviets as intermediates in peace negotiations. To wit:
July 11, 1945, Foreign Minister Shigenory Togo: "The foreign and domestic situation for the Empire is very serious, and even the termination of the war is now being considered privately...We are also sounding out the extent to which we might employ the USSR in connection with termination of the war ... [this is] a matter with which the Imperial Court is ... greatly concerned."
July 12: "It is His Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war ... However, as long as America and England insist on unconditional surrender our country has no alternative but to see it through in an all-out effort for the sake of survival and the honor of the homeland."
(The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 684-685)
Those were cables we intercepted. We went into Potsdam knowing exactly what the would accept and what they wouldn't, and we deliberately gave them what they wouldn't. Why?
Rhodes quotes Secretary of War Stimson in a remark to Harvey Bundy after Trinity: "Well, I have been responsible for spending two billions of dollars on this atomic venture. Now that it is successful I shall not be sent to prison in Fort Leavenworth." Stimson's comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the sentiment existed; it was felt that the expense had to be justified, the bomb had to be used. There was also the matter of ending affairs in such a way that we would not have to share the spoils with the Russians. For those reasons more than any others we needlessly killed 200,000 civilians, as well as as many American and Japanese soldiers died because the war was dragged on for more unnecessary weeks.
Revisionist history? Maybe so, by definition. But it's not a bad thing when you're replacing the lies with the truth. It's bad when it's the other way around.
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So yes, an American movie that accurately depicts the sneakiness of the sneak attack might have problems there.
We have our own similar buttons. Pearl Harbor did not justify what we did to Dresden, what Curtis LeMay did to the population centres of Japanese cities, or what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The idea of mass-attacking civilians to terrorize the enemy gradually developed through the war, and we were every bit as guilty as our enemies in deliberately extending the logic of strategic bombing. Yet you still meet people -- lots of them -- who are very defensive about the Manhattan Project and simply refuse to see what an evil thing it was in the end. After more than 55 years we are still pushing unnecessary weapon systems and misguided energy policies because we are unwilling to admit that the whole thing was just a bad idea inseparable from its legacy of misery and death.
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Mod me down, but I'm defending my country and this slander I cannot sit back and take:
<I>Your politically correct textbooks<I>
Now, I am not only a coder/Linux enthusiaist/gamer, but I am also a Polish historian and I know much more on this topic than you. The textbooks don't go over such things, they just tell what happened to Poland, my sources are texts from promiment authors.
<I>don't tell you about the Germans who were ethnicly cleansed from Poland following WWI.
or the many more forced to leave during the 20' and 30's do to officially backed anti-German pogroms. <I>
I know of no such progroms from the Pilduski government or the government thereafter, if there was such a thing, Hitler would have presented it in his propoganda machine and I have never found such a thing as this. As for the killing of Germans, groups of independent anti-German poles are as bad as groups of independent anti-Semitic Germans
<I>They don't tell you that Hitler signed a peace treaty with Poland in 1934, recognizing the existing borders, or that Danzig was a German city, not part of Poland, which wanted to rejoin Germany. Hitler's only territorial claims were Danzig, which was not Poland's anyway, and road and rail connections across Poland connecting East Prussia with the rest of Germany<I>
Danzig was a independent city, not German or Polish. Controlled by the League of Nations. It was not up to them, but the LoN. And Poland has the right to decide what to do with their own territory, its called soverignity.
<I>In other words, Germany was not asking for any Polish territory. <I>
I beg to differ, they asked for rail and roads, don't you consider that terriotry, and also, recall they also wanted Silesia, but did not include that foremost in their demands, (Slask)
<I> Now, another thing they don't tell you about that alleged staged German attack on the radio station: whatever the truth of the story, it was totally unnecessary, since Poland had been violating German territory and was trying to provoke a German attack, convinced that Britain and France would then come into the war and defeat Germany, thus giving Poland a chance to grab more German territory.<I>
So it happened and you can't admit the fact that I'm right. As for Poland violating Polish territory, Versallies and the 1934 treaty is what I'm going on, and what did a treaty mean to hitler anyway?
<I> Poland had already grabbed territory from Czechoslovakia, and was gunning for more. <I>
Over the city of Czesyn. So Poland was land hungry after WW1.
<I>Polish government officials boasted of their invasions of German territory<I>
No where have I run across officals bragging of this, the attitude in Poland was there wasn't even going to be a war. And the government knew that going to war would result in a disaster.
<I> and bragged that they would be marching into Berlin within a month or two after goading Germany into war.<I>
A Polish division did march into Germany and was within 100 miles of Berlin, but had to pull back when they saw that the war effort was going very bad.
<I> They were cocky and overconfident, after they had gotten the gaurantee from Britain that she would go to war if Germany attacked Poland. This was practically writing a blank check to Poland, since it encouraged Poland to do anything possible to provoke a war with Germany.
<I>
Poland was confident there would be no war. The alliance was done because they feared Germany would attack.
<I>This Poland proceeded to do, by attacking Germany with tiny cross border raids, and by instituting new pogroms against the German population in Poland. Of course this is not going to show up in your typical establishment history books<I> Yes, there were raids, just as Germans raided Poland.
<I> In fact most people reading this will assume I am making it up. But, do some research, the web is a good tool for discovering officially repressed history. <I> You mean pro-Nazi rubbish?
<I>Hitler had all the justification he needed for attacking Poland<I>
What justification, I just ruined all your so called justification
<I>without having to stage a Polish raid. That particular incident sounds like a ham-handed afterthought by some Nazi party hack on the make<I>
This hack was Hilter himself.
In conclusion, Poland did not provoke Hitler, Hitler intended to take Poland as Lebusarum, (living space), as early as 1937.
As for you dear AC, next time Log on with your account and take the karma beating like the bitch you are! Flaming bullshit like your post deserves to be modded down!
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Thank you. I have an errata. I ask this AC to please post me these links where you found these pages and I will give you all the books which I derive my material from my previous opinion alone.
Hitler told his force that he would "propogandize" the start of the Second World War, which he did by the radio station incident.
I demand you to counter my argument AC, or will you stay quiet with the truth now?
And stop visiting those revisionist sites.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Might be redundant...
I read the paper the other day, calling my Generation, (17-28), a whining generation. We simply whine about everything, that nationalism is a bad thing and PC. But Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" (the people in Pearl Harbor), was proud of their country..
The author has a valid point, we seem not to be proud to be American these days. I remember going into a IRC chat room and telling a story about displaying the American flag and I was called a nut.
Then, apparently, telling the story of America the victim of a vicious attack, is wrong and un-pc and is modififed by other countries, (is the pin-cushion Hitler in the movie modified as well? Maybe it should be a veteran because of how the movie butchers the battle)
Fuck political correctness, its getting so that we are so afraid on stepping on anyone's toes to tell any kind of truth. As for the right of nuking two cities, well, its better than the millions that would have been lost in the island invasion, look at Okinwana.
As for Germany, they started the war with a bullshit excuse of a Polish invasion of a German radio station, (Germans in Polish uniform invaded the station) and they seem to always be starting wars too.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Oh, I get it. We are supposed to be civilized with cold-blooded butchers. Calm the fears of those in the gas chambers. Please. I'm sorry you're German. Yes, German regulars were good people like you and me, and got slaughtered. But the big difference is that we didn't start this. IF we hadn't got involved, you, and an entire German-speaking continent would be sitting around thinking of plans for wiping out the blacks, then the French, then anyone else that didn't fit in. If you are in the slightest way different than most in your country, then I would consider an apology for the fact that you are even alive... thanks to our dead grandfathers. I REALLY HATE THE FACT THAT WE ARE GETTING BASHED FOR PUTTING OUR GRANDFATHERS GENERATION ON THE LINE TO PREVENT WORLD WIDE GENOCIDE... people often can't fathom 7 MILLION PLUS dead, just because they were Jews. Screw historical takes. I know it is not fashionable around here, but I AM A PATRIOT. I've seen a lot of anti-patriot stuff around here, and well, then move some where else if you don't like it. Don't just vacation, do it. Live in a German or Japanese HIVE, or deal with life in a lawless country, you bastards. Don't be your standard petulant, bitchy /. anti-conventionalist... put your money where your mouth is. I ain't movin' anywhere without a Bill of Rights, so stick it kids. MOVE YOU WHINERS. Be a man.
Perl? Perl Harbor? Wow. Gotta unhook occasionally there buddy. Crawl out of the programming pod, 'cause that subconscious is a gettin' to yer spellin'. :P
This is a Disneyfied movie on one of the more horrible things that has happened to the United States of America.
2,403 American soldiers died at Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack that lasted a little less than two hours. This movie lasts three, unfortunately.
You don't expect a flashy-silver-cool-pretty-movie type guy such as Jerry Bruckheimer to make something insightful or deep, do you? I didn't think so.
The way they've promoted this movie, I wouldn't be surprised if Ben Affleck action figures are included in the happy meals.
Anyone who sees this movie sort-of deserves what they get... A bloated, wanna-be war epic about a pretty boy, his friend, and the girl they want.
Woowoo, MTV showing at four.
Do you like German cars?
"Cryptographers hadn't yet broken the Japanese code" ... ha! I thought Slashdot was interested in the truth about the NSA and its predecessors.
Robert Hutchinson
Robert Hutchinson
Smash it. Smash it good.
Let's face it people, historical movies are only made in the US when the history being present goes down well with them. Heavens we think that a nation that's NOT the USA did somthing good or important in a war, or that they got bested by some Japanese.
Cue The Sun...
>>Before the bombing of Hiroshima, the US dropped >>leaflets warning citizens that the city would >>be destroyed, and telling them to evacuate
The US did not start leaflet-dropping until after Hiroshima, and Nagasaki received its leaflets the day after they bombed it.
graspee
It's been done as a TV documentary, and if you get the History Channel, you can see it for yourself: ToraToraTora: The True Story of Pearl Harbor includes interviews with Pearl Harbor veterans from both sides.
In one of the sequences, one of the Japanese pilots and one of the Americans talk about that meeting in 1995. The Japanese pilot apologized for attacking America, and the American said there was no need to apologize, because it was a war, and that is what men do in war. It was a brilliant thing to say, because it bracketed 50 years of history with four heroic acts by two heroic men.
--Blair
Sadly untrue. High production value historical movies are treated as gospel by the vast majority of ill educated (i.e. most) viewers. There is a real and material effect on educators.
I do Scottish Wars of Independence living history, and I spend at least half my time trying to convince incredulous brainwashed public that Wallace didn't wear a kilt, or tartan, or impregnate a 7 year old French princess from 400 miles away. Many of them just flat refuse to believe me - hey, they've seen it in a movie, so it must be true, right?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Disturbingly, Pearl Harbor continues Hollywood's trend of sacrificing historical accuracy for dramatic fiction in it's neverending quest to put more bums on seats.
That Ben Affleck's character has just returned from Europe having fought in the Battle of Britain and incarceration in a prisoner of war camp is completely laughable, just as the idea that Ralph Fiennes injured character in The English Patient would be transported back home to Britain via war-torn Italy.
And the list doesn't end there.
U-571 is an absolute joke: American sailor's boarding a German U-boat to capture a Enigma cypher machine is how Hollywood tells the story. History, on the other hand, tells us that the first Enigma was captured by the British before the US even entered the war!
There are other transgressors: Saving Private Ryan forgets that even the landing craft delivering US soldiers to the D-Day beaches were piloted by the men of the Royal Navy, and even Schindler's List strays from the truth in it's depiction of Oscar Schindler.
There are countless other examples. History is being bastardised left, right and centre and 99.9% of the audience is none the wiser. Worse still, many of these movies are used as teaching aids and are held up as being 100% historically accurate by people who should know better. And all so that some fat executive sitting in some plush studio office can make an extra buck.
I know that history is written by the victors but where does is say that it should be rewritten 50 years later in the name of greed? Is this what they fought for?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Take sappy romance + large-scale tragedy + sinking ship from Titanic, the top-grossing movie of 1997 (and all time)
Add the World War II patriotic factor from Saving Private Ryan, the top-grossing movie of 1998
Be careful to cater to every demographic group, and beware to not offend the Japanese, who added $200 million to Titanic's gross (they are reluctantly forced to raid and then second-guess themselves).
And you get Pearl Harbor, a movie designed from the ground up to make money, not be historically accurate.
I'm used to this sort of stuff from Hollywood, but in this case, we're talking about capitalizing on the slaughter of thousands of American soldiers. The film doesn't honor them, it adds them to the bottom line.
As Roger Ebert said: What is the point, really, of more than half an hour of planes bombing ships, of explosions and fireballs, of roars on the soundtrack and bodies flying through the air and people running away from fighters that are strafing them? How can it be entertaining or moving when it's simply about the most appalling slaughter? Why do the filmmakers think we want to see this, unrelieved by intelligence, viewpoint or insight? It was a terrible, terrible day.
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If Hollywood was accurate, all of my female friends would have boob jobs, and be sleeping with me every other day. And I'd be a Jedi warrior, in daily car chases, and doing a hell of a lot of cocaine.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Whether we should be concerned about it, well, just ask the folks at the Cartoon Network, who have the habit of censoring classic Warner Brothers cartoons, just on the off chance that they will turn a kid racist. Or, for that matter, television networks not being able to air certain words or body parts...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
John, how exactly does bad airline service, the network addiction, etc, correlate with perl harbor?
We stood by and let Germans kill millions of Jews. But when it came to our boys, it suddenly mattered.
That's a major, major crock if I've ever heard one, John, and you should be ashamed of yourself. NO PART OF WAR is excusable, ignorable, and without effect on emotion.
It's no big wonder you can't seem to catch on anywhere other then here. And, oh yeah, you seem to lessen the quality.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
If you've watch Babylon 5, you'll recall the detonation scene that wipe up all Shadows bases in Centauri Prime. I'll not be surprise that there are such devices is planted beneath Japan mainland. It might be a secret that not even known by US and Japan citizen. Anyway, this is just a conspiracy theory...
I like hearing what the Filthy Critic has to say. Always gives me a good laugh and is usually right on the dot about movies;)
Speaking from a U.S. perspective, I cannot help but wonder if it's fair for a movie industry that seems to oppose individual freedom to benefit from the stories of those who are reputed to have fought for it.
Indeed, I think the argument can be made that the injection of the "romance-subplot" into the story of Pearl Harbor cheapens the events that actually took place there, and therefore also lessens historical respect for the events of WWII. I can also see an argument for the romantic subplot adding a human dimension to the those events.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
Look. Yes, America ended up killing a bunch of Japanese civilians. As someone has already pointed out, that happened years after Pearl Harbor, and it happened BECAUSE they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Also, have you the vaguest notion of the horrible things that Japan did to China and Korea and the Pilipines that made the U.S. start thinking about a war with Japan? I don't know if you're trolling, or what, but trendily whining about racism isn't always the sharpest thing to do on Slashdot.
Today is a good day to die. They all are, though.
Practical Extraction And Report Language.
Now, can someone please explain what the term 'practical' is doing in the name of that language?
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
We provoked Japan so that we could go to war with Germany.
witty commentary is highly overrated
"Pearl Harbor" has been compared to "Titanic" by many here, but this note brings up an idea. How different would the movie have been (and how different the reaction) if it closed, not with Doolitte's raid, but with that 1995 ceremony? Just re-create it and age one of the principals (kill off the others), bring up the music....and watch the WWII veterans howl!
Recently, I saw "The King is Alive" which is a Dogme-95 film (http://www.tvropa.com/tvropa1.2/film/dogme95/menu /menuset.htm) which prohibits an artifical overly emotional soundtrack. I'm really becoming aware of how Hollywood has to use the fake score to tell you what you're supposed to be thinking.
Another point was that the US was already in a state of 'phony-war' with the Japanese. There was no declaration, but it was already expected that a war would take place. To have so many assets in one place under such circumstances was not exactly good planning. It was just chance that the other carrier group were at sea, away from Pearl at the time.
Well I'm probably wrong, but it seems to me that there is a difference between truth and "politically correct". PC is more or less trying to portray certain aspects without that which is deemed to be steriotypical or racist, or something of that line.
Okay, I'll put it like this. Say there was a native american guy (yeah, using them for an example again) who hated white people, killed them left and right, and did all sorts of horrible things. Someone makes a movie about it. The movie isn't considered politically correct (by the general populace) because it portrays native americans to be "evil", despite being the truth about this ONE guy. Now of course native americans on a whole aren't like this, but there is maybe a couple cases that say otherwise. Now say we change this so that he's just "misunderstood", and always happens to end up being portrayed as the bad guy even though he's not. Is it PC? yes. Is it truthful? no.
What I meant by too PC basically people overact and take a generalizatoin way out of context. Like that whole Jarjar blinks thing in star wars which was making the movie racist because he acted stupid and supposidly had a Jamacan accent. Maybe too PC isn't the right way to put it, but "stupidity" is a very broad term that covers way too many people.
one, just one....
- 3 reactor technicians in idaho (one impaled on the ceiling by a control rod, all were buried in lead coffins, their upper torsos and hands disposed of as nuclear waste)
- everybody who visited the chernobyl site in the two weeks after the accident, including the helicopter pilots who flew over trying to get photos of the burning reactor core.
- karen silkwood.
just off the top of my head.
as for those killed/maimed by the ongoing effects of radiation? http://www.tmia.com/daisies.html - great pictures of mutated plant and animal life taken 10 - 15 years after three mile island.
the url says it all.. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ngbe yond/index.html
During the Kosovo air war against the Serbs the Nato forces claimed 16 tanks destroyed out of 800-900. It seems all high-tech can't tell the difference between a tank idling its deisel in a barn and a keosene lamp and some fake tank tracks leading to a barn.
> Millions of innocent civilians getting fried to a crisp. They weren't fried. Some closer to ground-zero evaporated, others melted, burned, or died slowly due to radiation.
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Open Source Shirts
I know that's not really relevant for the apparent majority of Slashdot readers, but both here in Germany and over there in Japan people do see catastrophically patriotic movies like Pearl Harbor with a bit of a mixed feeling. In the same category of movie, we have, for example, The Bridge at Remagen (I think that's the English title) which is where my grandfather happened to die, countless movies about the Battle of Britain, about the war in the Pacific and so on. Are you aware that a war that people who are now your allies lost may actually cause problems to these very people when they're portrayed as "100% baddie, 0% character"? (I mean, over here about 60% of the population lost a relative during the War, and I don't really want to imagine what a Japanese feels like when he looks at a video that depicts Nagasaki.)
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
There were, actually, some pilots from other countries than Britain who fought in the Battle of Britain; for example, some Polish and Canadians actually managed to get quite a good reputation. However, the bit about incarceration in POW camps is quite laughable indeed... However, it somehow had to be included for the sake of war athmosphere, it seems.
One should add that the best movie about German submarine warfare is still the classic Das Boot (see other review with different trailers). The submarines were actually one of Germany's most technologically advanced and most terrifying weapons, especially since they did see some large scale use; on the other hand, more than 90% of German submariners did not return from the War.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
"The screenwriter is clearly going for another grand-scale Titanic."
Why do I suspect that a legion of 12 to 14 year old girls will be crying about how sad it is that Pearl Harbor gets bombed?
I'm the stranger...posting to
I was listening to NPR yesterday, and they had a guy on (I forget his name, sorry) who made a couple of interesting points. First of all, he mentioned that there is a higher incidence of hate crimes against Asian-Americans on Dec. 7. He also mentioned that after the release of other Pearl Harbor movies such as Tora Tora Tora, there has been a temporary increase in violence against Asian-Americans.
This is an interesting example of a well-known phenomenon, the larger-than-life effect of movies. Quite simply, the images and sounds of a move can have enormous psychological impact on people even when they know rationally that there is no reason for them to be emotional. That's how, for example, horror movies and tearjerkers can be effective. Our brains just aren't wired to disregard the sort of full-screen, Dolby Digital input you get in a movie theatre.
In short, it is entirely possible that "Pearl Harbor" may cause an increase in racist behavior, if past experience is anything to go by. Note, however, that I am not saying the producers, writers, or audience are bigots. I am just saying that movies influence people in a variety of subconcious ways, and this movie may have the effect I mentioned. Thoughts?
I'm the stranger...posting to
I know this would never happen, but I wish more movies wouild be made about people making peace, instead of war. For example, in 1995 a group of Japanese and American Pearl Harbor veterans met at the USS Arizona memorial, and shook hands, and hugged, and at least made the effort to forgive each other for the hell that was Pearl Harbor.
When I heard about this, I thought - and still think - that this was one of the noblest, most heroic things I had ever heard. To forgive a man who killed your friends, because that is simply the right thing to do - I don't know if I could do that, but I hope I could. These men - Japanese and American both - at the 1995 meeting were heroes, but will any movies be made celebrating that? No, but a movie about these same men bombing the *$%! out of each other will sell like the proverbial hotcakes. I think that's sick, and I think that's wrong.
I'm the stranger...posting to
"For a fuller account of George Welch's Aviation Career see:" The URL is http://home.att.net/~historyzone/Welch1.html Sorry 'bout that...
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
>I think you're misusing the word "context". You're alive and talking in the present, about a movie which was released in the last few days.If this were actually 1941, maybe you could get away with using the word "Nips", but it's not. When was the last time you heard a historian use the word "Nigger"? Never, because they know that they're talking about history, not trying to pretend that they're actually in the past.Second, if you're going to insult the Japanese by calling them "Nips" , you'd better be ready to be called a "redneck", "hick", or even a "yankee" (an ironic insult, I guess). From my experience, un-PC types are quite surprised to learn that it goes both ways ("What, you mean those red/brown/black folk can call us names too?"). Get used to it. As stated before I was not referring to the Japanese per se, but rather to something very closely associated with ***IMPERIAL DAI NIPPON.*** I recommend that you reevaluate you hyper-sensitive PC proclivities, and consider the --now let's all say it-- CONTEXT in which a word is used, prior to posting sanctimonious Charlie Sierra.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
>I think you're misusing the word "context". You're alive and talking in the present, about a movie which was released in the last few days.
No I did not misuse the word 'context,' indeed I used it in the grammatical correct (GC) sense. Second, while I am alive I was not talking in the present, I was at that time *writing* in the present. My post dealt -directly-- with the actual facts of the Imperial Japanese Navy's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and only indirectly with the newly released movie 'Pearl Harbor.' You should note that I did not call any person a 'Nip,' but rather referred to an aircraft as being 'Nip,' which is to say that I identified the aircraft that were shot down by Welch, and Taylor as belong to the *Imperial Japanese Navy*.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
>If this were actually 1941, maybe you could get away with using the word "Nips", but it's not. When was the last time you heard a historian use the word "Nigger"? Never, because they know that they're talking about history, not trying to pretend that they're actually in the past.
My statement about "Nip aircraft" was no different that historian referring to U-571, or whatever as a Nazi submarine. To refer to something as Nazi, or Fascist is in no way a denigration, respectively, of things German, or Italian, or Spanish. In the same vain; to refer to something as being Nip, or to someone as being a Nip is to identify that thing, or person as have a very close association with the IMPERIAL military, or naval forces of IMPERIAL DAI NIPPON, or to identify it, or them as being very closely associated with the pro-war faction of *Imperial Dai Nippon*.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
>Second, if you're going to insult the Japanese by calling them "Nips" , you'd better be ready to be called a "redneck", "hick", or even a "yankee" (an ironic insult, I guess). From my experience, un-PC types are quite surprised to learn that it goes both ways ("What, you mean those red/brown/black folk can call us names too?"). Get used to it.
As stated before I was not referring to the Japanese per se, but rather to something very closely associated with ***IMPERIAL DAI NIPPON.***
I recommend that you reevaluate you hyper-sensitive PC proclivities, and consider the --now let's all say it-- CONTEXT in which a word is used, prior to posting sanctimonious Charlie Sierra.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
I feel that Pearl Harbor addressed a lot of issues that previously had not been addressed in a lot of hollywood movies. First off, outside of the Tuskagee Airmen, I can't think offhand of any movies that included African Americans, let alone credited them with doing something for the war effort. Also, no movies have EVER gone into women's contributions to the war. To show that women were gunned down while performing their nursing duties is one of the first times that credit has been given. I think you have to look beyond some of the historical inaccuracies like the number of planes, etc., and look at what the movie is trying to tell us.
It's trying to say that Pearl Harbor was a tragedy which left lives shattered and changed. It was the first step that involved sending Amerians across the Pacfic and Atlantic. I feel that people are trying to downplay its significance. How significant is the story of Private Ryan compared to Pearl Harbor? The love story, as did the story of Private Ryan, helped show how peoples lives were changed and the tragedy that people felt.
I think we all need to reevaluate our criticisms of the movie.
sj
it's johh harNETT
as in the tommy lee jones lookalike
sj
I would like to see a movie about the day(s) the bombs fell on hirosima and nagasaki. Maybe the trailer would show japanese boys playing carefree before the bomb. or even maybe a young japanese couple romancing outside on a beautiful day.
Anything this heavily promoted will bring in $200M+ Stateside, no matter how crummy it is or how many critics bash it mercilessly. But that won't change the fact that outside the U.S., no one gives a rat's ass about Pearl Harbor. It's a uniquely American tragedy, and frankly we don't care. Will the remaining $300M required for this movie to break-even come from our pockets? No.
Try laying down your life for the good of humanity and then looking down from wherever you may be and watching your sacrifice twisted into a pathetic lie.
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This is incorrect. I've met someone who piloted a landing craft at Normandy delivering American soldiers to the Omaha landing area. He was serving in the American Navy not the Royal Navy. Whatever it's historical transgressions, you can't fault Saving Private Ryan on this account.
Accurate history. By the way, if anybody wants to see get a picture of the Japanese economic situation during World War II, find the animated cartoon The Grave of Fireflies. I watched it immediately after watching Pearl Harbor with a Japanese history major and a fairly ethnically diverse group of friends. Probably one of the most depressing movies I've seen, but it made me feel better. I was really angry about the how much the Japanese were demonized. Unfortunately the movie is NOT a history film...it IS a drama, and every drama needs its antagonist.
I have no desire to reach nirvana.
"only hideous blond/blue-eyed freaks "
Don't you think that equaling people who happened to be blond with freaks is just as racist as anything you accuse Germans of?
BTW. It is not their fault that you are so jealous of their blond hair and blond eyes.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.