PEARL HARBOR (2001)  *

Reviewed 5/25/01

Early on in PEARL HARBOR, Ben Affleck describes flying a plane as “It’s all about feeling and speed.”  That’s an apt description of the intentions behind director Michael Bay’s aesthetic.  Bay has got “speed” down, but authentic feeling is totally alien in his films.

PEARL HARBOR arrives with enormous buzz generated by an appalling trailer.  It was the “dawn of a nation’s greatest glory” the trailer chimes with the unintended implication that consummation of said glory is the atomic bombing death of over 100,000 Japanese.  Disney’s Touchstone has crassly marketed the film by linking it with patriotism.  The trailer includes such Americana as children playing baseball or a boy holding a waving flag.  Disney devoted $5 million to the movie’s world premiere for enlisted personnel and veterans aboard an aircraft carrier at Pearl Harbor itself.  If this cynicism sounds unwarranted, one has only to watch this atrocious movie to realize that it is not about patriotism or honoring sacrifice but about money.

PEARL HARBOR is so baldly calculated, the pitch must have been “TITANIC plus SAVING PRIVATE RYAN,” and producer Jerry Bruckheimer tosses in his own TOP GUN for good measure.  PEARL HARBOR’s first ninety minutes is about a love triangle between two pilots and a nurse, the last ninety is the two pilots versus the Japanese.  After THE ROCK and ARMAGEDDON, Bruckheimer must have been certain he could finally pick up female viewers with this formula while maintaining his male audience with the usual adrenaline pumping fare.  Also, can there be any doubt that Cuba Gooding, Jr. is only in this movie because he is black?

In PEARL HARBOR, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) becomes enamored of nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) when she gives him a bye on an eye test he would otherwise fail, ending his career as a pilot.  “Maam, please don’t take my wings,” Rafe pleads.  Since Rafe can’t even read the top line of the eye chart, Evelyn would really be doing the U.S. military some good, but then we wouldn’t have a movie.  Rafe volunteers to help the British against the Nazis, and he tells Evelyn, “Could you not see me off tomorrow.  Saying goodbye to you once is hard enough.”  Cue laughably bad lovers-separated-at-departing-train scene.  In letters, Rafe tells Evelyn how cold he is in Europe, and she writes back, “I try to draw the heat from the sun and send back to you.”   But when Rafe’s plane goes down over the English Channel and Evelyn believes he is dead, she falls into a relationship with Rafe’s best friend since childhood, Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett).  Rafe gets back to them in Hawaii a tad unhappy about this development, but he has bigger worries as the Japanese obliterate the U.S. Pacific fleet. 

Bay started off as a director of commercials, and he is lucky when his scenes in PEARL HARBOR last longer than a commercial.   They go by so fast, there is no time to even respond to them.  After Rafe’s apparent death, Bay devotes literally 3 seconds to Evelyn’s crying in bed.  Danny woos Evelyn by taking her up in a plane to watch the sunset.  That scene might be a minute long.  Has Bay never watched the sequence from SUPERMAN with Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder flying over the city?  What Bay is doing is not storytelling; it is the equivalent of skimming a book.

Writer Randall Wallace is of no help.   Instead, he keeps the howlers coming with lines like “If I had only one more night in my life, I’d want to spend it with you,” and “I’ll never be able to look at another sunset without thinking of you.”  Kate Beckinsale is no idiot.  She went to Oxford.   Did she not plead, “Michael Bay, please don’t make me say these lines!”  Where PEARL HARBOR does try for humor, it is utterly unfunny, and where it is supposed to be serious – like when the Brits give Rafe a plane covered in its previous pilot’s brains or when F.D.R. pulls a Dr. Strangelove – it is unintentionally comical.   The characters are all so rote or just plain empty that there’s no reason to care for any of them or their soap opera relationships.

The advertising for PEARL HARBOR has used spectacle as the main appeal, and the movie tries to deliver, but it doesn’t know when to start nor when to stop.  Anyone wanting the action sequences promised in the trailer will have to wade through an hour-and-a-half of the most mind-numbingly tedious love story in recent memory.  (Hint: SHREK was an hour-and-a-half by itself.)  When the pyrotechnics finally arrive, it goes on and on and on, and finally just gets really boring.

After a period of war films, primarily about or with shades of Vietnam, in which the moral complexity of war is deeply questioned, PEARL HARBOR may just have future notoriety marking the return of the war-as-exciting-spectacle movie.  Few would find the glamorization of war worthwhile if they recognized it for what it is, and veterans should be insulted that Pearl Harbor has been turned into a mediocre action movie attached to the lamest of love stories.