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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.
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
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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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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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.
"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
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.
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.
Dolittle's raid is one of the truely great stories of human acts in the time of war, for all the real effect it may or may not have had. However. . .
It's inclusion in the movie was for one reason, and one reason *only*:
To allow the Americans to be the 'winners' at the end of the film.
KFG
As you can tell from this article in The New York Daily News.
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
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)
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.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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
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.
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