PEARL HARBOR
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Flawed? Perhaps. Bad? Perhaps
not. The story is simplistic, but not
unwatchable. Close friends separated by a love
triangle are brought back together by a higher
cause and their mutual love of flying. The
story is told against the backdrop of the
Japanese sneak attack that brought the US into
World War II. The film features some nice
visuals and some good special effects used
imaginatively. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), +1 (-4 to
+4)
Months ago the trailer for PEARL HARBOR intrigued me. Then I got a rude shock at the end that it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Michael Bay. Bruckheimer is the king of sound and fury action film blockbusters. Michael Bay was his director on THE ROCK and ARMAGEDDON. PEARL HARBOR got some really negative critical response prior to its release. This may have lowered my expectations, but I really do not see what the fuss was about. I would probably call PEARL HARBOR a flawed film, but not a bad one. Its historical accuracy is better than many films set in the past but still worse than some. PEARL HARBOR suffers a great deal from comparison to TORA! TORA! TORA!, one of the finest and most accurate films about World War II and the classic account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plot is a somewhat mythic story (some might call it "cliched") of two close friends who fall out when they innocently both come to love the same woman. Then they have their relationship patched up when they face a cause more important than their differences.
PEARL HARBOR is the story of two men, friends since their boyhood in Tennessee. Rafe McCawley (played by Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) have a friendship based on each's love of airplanes and flight. They join the Army Air Corps together and during the physical Rafe falls for an attractive nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). Evelyn quickly becomes the second love in Rafe's life; flying remains the first. Even as he woos her, giving her origami birds, flying is never far from his mind. (Origami is ironically a Japanese art.) When Rafe gets an opportunity to fly with the RAF he takes it leaving Danny and Evelyn behind. Then he is shot down and thought to be dead the predictable love triangle is set in motion.
The casting of PEARL HARBOR, like most aspect of the film is flawed. Affleck is hardly the most charismatic lead, but here he flies rings around the low-key Hartnett. Beckinsale is a good actor, probably most familiar for her role in COLD COMFORT FARM. John Voight's face is just enough wrong for FDR to be irksome, like a musical note played just slightly off-key. Mako, of the Conan movies, somehow plays a very different type of officer from how we are used to seeing Yamamoto from films like TORA! TORA! TORA! and MIDWAY. Alec Baldwin plays a somewhat idealized Doolittle while Dan Aykroyd, looking a little fat, is a navy intelligence officer.
It is, perhaps, unfair to compare TORA! TORA! TORA! too closely with PEARL HARBOR. The former is an attempt at a very accurate representation; the latter is a polished and soft focus love story told against a backdrop of America's entry into the war. It might be more accurate to compare it to HANOVER STREET, even with the big spectacular set piece of the half-hour of film devoted to an attack that was only about an hour long in real life. Bay uses time to show the viewer a lot of different scenes of the destruction and how the Americans fought back.
PEARL HARBOR is a film that has an extremely nice look. The cinematography seems far better than the writing. It is one of those films in which you could take a frame from one of any number of the scenes and use it for a poster for the film. The frame composition is often beautiful and occasionally even a little too perfect and overly dramatic. Early in the film Bay captures a very nice 1941 feel and then drenches the scenes in a rich blue to top off the image. The viewer can frequently tell the CGI from reality, but when it is following a bomb from the moment it is dropped down into a compartment in a battleship, at least it is an imaginative use. At another point two sailors on a scaffold on the side of a battleship see a torpedo approaching below them and hitting their boat. In another interesting usage of the visual effects a nurse is slowly overcome by the horror of the casualties she is seeing she enters a state of shock. The camera shows this by leaving her in focus and selectively loses focus on her surroundings. These are scenes that could never have been shown even in a TORA! TORA! TORA!.
The style of PEARL HARBOR is spotty. While the film shows half an hour of unremitting violence, it is fairly reserved in its showing of blood and there is no visible dismemberment, unlike SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Only the hospital scenes show serious carnage. The dogfight scenes seem a little too much like a video game. And the rock song over the end credits was horribly out of place and will be an embarrassment when this film is seen again in years to come.
Pearl Harbor is over three hours long, but is always worth watching, if not worth listening to. The film had undeniable problems, but it was released needing only a fine tuning not the overhaul must critics are implying is called for. I rate it a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@avaya.com
Copyright 2001 Mark R. Leeper
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