*1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Sizemore, and Jon Voight.
Directed by Michael Bay.
2001 PG13
To everyone who thought “Titanic” was a great movie, you have no one to blame for “Pearl Harbor” except yourselves. “Pearl Harbor” is a total copy of “Titanic’s” underlying sentimentality and lowest-common denominator pandering, stripped of James Cameron’s craft. Just like “Titanic,” it reduces a bloody historical tragedy to a boring love story involving one-dimensional characters, set before a melee of special effects.
While the style of “Pearl Harbor” may be derivative of “Titanic,” its story borrows from the superior “From Here to Eternity” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” with a little “The Thin Red Line” thrown in for good measure, and “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” tacked on at the end. Boyhood friends Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett join the Army Air Corps just before World War II and both fall in love with the same nurse (Kate Beckinsale), first Affleck, who is shot down and left for dead over the English Channel, then Hartnett, who in comforting Beckinsale for her loss gets a little carried away. Then Affleck comes back to life and the Japanese lay waste to Pearl Harbor. Both Affleck and Hartnett are able to get up in the air and shoot down some “Jap suckers” (somehow I imagine real WWII pilots were more colorful with their insults). Then they join the bomber retaliation on Tokyo. All this takes three hours of our time.
In glancing over my summary, it certainly doesn’t sound necessarily like a bad movie, but it is. Director Michael Bay, who achieved the impossible in “The Rock” by making Sean Connery unlikable, at least makes mildly engaging combat sequences, but the interpersonal stuff that consumes the first ninety minutes is clumsy and contrived. The dialogue is wholly patriotic platitudes or romantic platitudes, and the characters are all drawn from generic 1950s war movies with profanity used to “update” them. Affleck, Hartnett, and Beckinsale—all talented thespians—are unable to bring any interest to characters that are basically unwritten. Of the three, only Affleck is able to let a glimmer of his charisma slip through during some early scenes of slapstick, and remind us how good he is when given well-written characters, like in “Chasing Amy” or “Shakespeare in Love.”
“Pearl Harbor” is not, however, wholly without good technique: the score by Hans Zimmer is good because it is derivative of his own work on “The Thin Red Line,” the overly-colorful cinematography might be interesting if director Bay let his camera hold still for more than a split second, and the special effects are entertaining, in those rare instances when I’m able to push my repulsion for the characters and the film’s overall treatment out of my mind. Perhaps the biggest strike against “Pearl Harbor” is that it thinks itself an epic, it behaves as if it’s making a statement about love and war, and ends with a condescending, gushy speech about World War II that, if spoken flatly, would sound like a lecture to second-graders. “Pearl Harbor” isn’t the first disposable movie to be made about the Second World War—there have been and will be hundreds, some good and some bad—but it is perhaps the most offensive because it carries itself with an undeserved air of profundity.
Finished April 19, 2002.
Copyright (c) 2002 Friday & Saturday Night