Pearl Harbor

Unfortunately, all the good scenes in "Pearl Harbor" were in the preview. Midway through the film, director Michael Bay turns his attention from the characters he has been so assiduously following and provides something amazing: wordless shots of women hanging laundry and kids playing baseball in Hawaiian paradise, suddenly stopped in their tracks by a strange buzz overhead, which they soon see comes from warplanes emblazoned with a fierce red sun. There is a chill, a dread expectancy to these scenes which is nearly unforgettable, and reminds you of the terror and awful power of the battle of Pearl Harbor.

The rest of the film is designed, from the ground up, to make money. There are battle scenes of all kinds, of course, which will no doubt bring in this film's core audience of action moviegoers. To satisfy females, who, it is presumed, don't like war movies, there is a love story, fictional, predictable and pointless, featuring the prettiest white people money can hire.

To sell itself to the African-American crowd, the film briefly dallies in the story of Doris "Dorrie" Miller, managing to turn one of the most heroic men at Pearl Harbor into a mere token. Because Asian-Americans are becoming ever more economically powerful, the film takes pains not to demonize the Japanese attackers, and occasionally notes the contributions of Asian-Americans to the American war effort. And, of course, to get the money of the people who responded to the heartfelt hagiography of "Saving Private Ryan," "Pearl Harbor" offers carelessly scripted bromides about the greatness of that generation at every turn, occasionally slipping into outright jingoism. "Pearl Harbor" has everything it needs to attract an audience, except quality of any kind.

One could argue that this movie isn't really about Pearl Harbor at all, since it spends most of its time following the above mentioned pretty white people. Two hunky pilots, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), grow up as best friends, and no one's happier for Rafe than Danny when nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) becomes the love of Rafe's life after the pair gets a little too close during a medical examination. It is symptomatic of this film's failings that the romance between Rafe and Evelyn is conducted primarily by the repetition of cringe-inducing cliches. Anyway, Rafe and Evelyn are separated when Rafe heads off to - no, not Pearl Harbor, but merrie olde England, to fight the Luftwaffe. We're at least an hour through this three-hour tour before all the principals are united in Pearl Harbor, through a plot twist which I will not reveal, not because it would ruin the surprise - anyone with half a brain will see it coming - but because it is just that retarded.

No one could possibly make this part of Randall Wallace's script interesting, but Bay doesn't do it any favors. Bay is a certified brilliant action purveyor, but he has not much idea how to direct humans. He has backed off the hyperactive direction which made even the sedate moments of "Armageddon" hair-raisingly difficult to follow, but that doesn't mean he has any good idea of what to do here. His primary tactic to establish a romantic atmosphere is to zoom the camera such that all we can see is Ben Affleck's face from forehead to chin, which over a three-hour span becomes memorable in an uninvited way.

Once we get into the actual battle, things seem to be picking up a bit. There is a certain unrelenting quality to the assault which seems only right and proper, and Bay certainly does not shy away from exploding things. The computer-animated Japanese Zeros fly like hawks, bullets trace deadly vectors, and the shell-shocked hysteria plays out for so long that you get caught up in it. Unfortunately, Bay and Wallace cannot resist presenting Rafe and Danny as (nonexistent, remember) superheroes. The film loses its realism and its intensity right about when Rafe and Danny shoot down seven Zeros, rush to help Evelyn by giving blood, and immediately scoot over to the U.S. Arizona for a made-for-cinema moment of desperation which almost minimizes the tragedy aboard that ship with its utter artificiality. And it's hard to view the Doolittle raid as a footnote, but that's exactly what it feels like here, especially when one considers that the absurdly overblown after-raid speech asserts that Japan began retreating immediately afterwards.

The one thing to like about "Pearl Harbor" is that it is largely historically accurate, except for the stuff that was obviously made up. (Someone want to tell us how Evelyn has a stomach flatter than Kansas when she's six months pregnant?) But by the end of the film, you're ready to ascribe the devotion to facts to a desire to attract the movie-going dollars of history buffs.

"Pearl Harbor" has a lot more problems than we can address here. (You don't have time to read about all of them.) But the main problem is that it uses one of the most tragic and momentous events in American history in an undisguised and undisguisable attempt to make a whole pile of money. Despite its rich material, patriotic trappings and Memorial Day opening, there is nothing involving, inspiring or humbling about "Pearl Harbor." It is as crass in its goals and methods as a five-dollar prostitute.

PROPS OVER THERE

I would like to note here that Mike Sapoznikow provided all the comments about Pearl Harbor's historical accuracy, which I myself am not qualified to judge. Mike is a man of integrity and great good humor, which is why he disliked this film as much as I did. I was actually going to put a bunch more problems with the film here, but I have decided not to, except to quote Mike in noting that the entire nursing staff was taken from wartime pinup posters and that some of the T&A shots of Beckinsale were a tad excessive, even for a Michael Bay film. Let's all thank Mike for making our lives brighter.

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