Review: Pearl Harbor (2001) · 4:21am Dec 11th, 2015
Okay, so, for reasons that, in hindsight, were probably not that good, me and my sister decided to watch Michael Bay’s notoriously overblown, melodramatic, horrifically historically inaccurate propaganda/war/romance flick, Pearl Harbor.
And boy, oh boy, was it a horrific waste of three hours of my life.
Michael Bay spins a tale of love triangles and areal attacks that moves at the speed of molasses. In an apparent desire to emulate classic romance/war flicks like From Here to Eternity and Gone with the Wind, he stretches the film out to three hours and fifteen minutes, and I swear to you, never has three hours passed so horrifically slowly. If there is a positive, it’s that in his intentional attempts at retro styled film making, he usually avoids his notorious use of shaky cam, and eye bleeding color schemes. The overall cinematography of the film is rather fair, with some decent colors and sunsets, and, as is standard for a Bay film, the pyrotechnics are top notch. But more on that later.
It’s very clear that Michael Bay is not a director of romance. Despite his attempts to romanticize every single frame focusing on an unlikable and unconvincing Ben Affleck, and an oddly stiff Kate Beckinsale, Bay still only creates an overblown showcase of nothing. Part of this can be blamed certainly on Randall Wallace’s screenplay, which, like the rest of the film, hyper romanticizes EVERYTHING without any real depth to the proceedings or character interactions. Using the cliche “Lovers Separated By Conflict” AND the “Girl Things Her Man is Dead So She Shacks Up with Her Man’s Best Bud” tropes at the same time, Wallace’s screenplay stumbles over itself, and inflates every random event, no matter how trivial or empty, as if it were a love story for the ages, therefore making it laughably over the top.
It certainly doesn’t help that pretty much every performance here is either stale as six month old bread (Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale), awkwardly affected (Josh Hartnett, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight), or just simply a head scratcher (Michael Shannon just hovers around the edge of the frame continually, and I swear I spent half the movie just shouting “Holy shit, it’s Michael Shannon!”). Taken together, they all take this idiotic script DEAD SERIOUSLY, which, of course, simply highlights how bad it is. It doesn’t help that, in the case of Ben Affleck, right at the heights of his pre-Gilgi arrogance, is given a fantastically unlikable character to play in the Maverick-rip-off Raif. He has no real character to him except that he’s a daredevil pilot, and given that Affleck was a rather arrogant fella back then, it just makes him insufferable. That damned chin….
Joss Hartnett tries, oh does he try, to be a wholesome counterpart in the character of Danny, who just ends up following Raif around like a sad puppy, and the dynamic between him and Raif ends up less like long held friendship, and more like unrequited romantic feelings with the way Danny goes on about Raif. I swear, almost all their scenes play out like weird attempts at romance, which just makes this all the more awkward. Also, since Hartnett is stuck playing the “Nice Guy” it also means he has the same sad puppy face for the whole film, and also gets completely screwed over by the plot.
Ironically, Hartnett has far better chemistry with Kate Beckinsale then Ben Affleck does, and Hartnett and Beckinsale’s scenes actually have a spark of romantic chemistry that feels genuine, especially compared to forced, faux-Casablanca style that Beckinsale and Affleck’s scenes have.
Speaking of Kate, she tries her darnedest, but considering she’s the lady in a love triangle with two men, she’s basically there to be the Romantic Football, tossed about and treated like fancy window dressing. It doesn’t help that Michael Bay is NOT a director of women, that’s for sure, and her performance comes across as stilted and stiff, which is a shame, since she played a similar “Nice Girl” type in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, and did it quite well.
Well, moving on from the acting, we move to the main topic of a Michael Bay film: action.
It sucks.
Now, I will say that the MASSIVE Pearl Harbor attack sequence is rather well put together, if only for the sheer amount of practical explosions and the like that chew up a good 45 minutes of screen time. Yet, at the same time, by the point we reach this part of the story (and arguably the only reason anybody would watch this), it’s taken us two entire hours of horrible romance and love triangle silliness to get here, and by this point, I was just exhausted. Cue a battle sequence that goes on for an eon and a half, focusing on people I don’t care about, who somehow survive only because the plot demands so. It doesn’t help that we get actual glimpses of the ACTUAL, HISTORICAL heroes of Pearl Harbor, such as Dorie Miller, an African American ship’s cook who manned a machine gun during the attack (played by Cuba Gooding Jr., and who arguably gets the best acting here…). Of course, his subplot is treated with a sense of being added only as an means to show more action, and so he’s relatively glosses over, in favor of more love triangles. It also doesn’t help that the film puts the FICTIONAL characters that Affleck and Hartnett play as the US pilots who took to the skies to fight off Japanese air attacks (the ACTUAL pilots who did this were named George Welch and Kenneth M. Taylor, and their story is a thousand times more interesting then the drivel we’re force-fed here, so go look them up.) It’s all just so aggravating.
Of course, the other moments of historical inaccuracy are so many that, in all honesty, you could fill an entire book with them, and still have more to find with each viewing. Stuff as minor as the wrong paint job on Japanese Zero aircraft (they were painting light gray/white during the attack, NOT dark green), to complete impossibility (P-40 Warhawks could NOT outmaneuver A6M Zeros. In fact, pilots were ordered to fly away as fast as possible, since P-40s in general were faster and tougher then Zeros, albeit less agile), along with other types of hiccups (nobody smokes in this movie, which is, of course, idiotic, since EVERYBODY smoked in the 1940s).
Also, did I mention that this film feels like a propaganda film? The Japanese, who are only ever shown deviously plotting against the USA (meeting outdoors even, something the Japanese were against at the time), and are also shown being far more vicious in the attack then they actually were (namely, no Japanese aircraft attacked ANY hospitals, and NO nurses died at all, let alone at the hands of the Japanese). Plus, the film treats the attack on Pearl Harbor as if it were an event of the level of 9/11, which, while it certainly had an intensely traumatic impact on the nation as a whole, is still nowhere near as horrific and demonically evil as 9/11. Like, chill out movie. It also doesn’t help that this film just hammers home “AMERICA AMERICA AMERICA” with every single shot. From over done slow-motion shots of the flag waving in the wind (or floating among the bodies of the dead), to just the general aura of everything, it felt like I was being hit by a sledgehammer.
And I’m a huge patriot. But hell, even I can acknowledge that Pearl Harbor’s attack was not only the result of Japanese aggression, but also the USA’s willful ignorance of what the Japanese were willing and able to do to achieve their goals.
But that’s a discussion for another time, since this is a film review, and not an essay on the political dynamics of World War 2.
Also, instead of just ending on Pearl Harbor, which would have been a downbeat, if appropriately sober ending for the film, the film goes on for another hour at least, focusing now on the Doolittle Raid, which, while an awesome act of bravery, here feels simply as an add on in order to inject more sensationalized, oddly propagandist motifs and tropes into an already over packed film.
Long story short, the film is a 3 hour bore, that just goes on and on and on, and is just an overblown, overcooked, maudlin mess of a film. Avoid it if you can. If you ever feel the desire to watch a film about Pearl Harbor, just go watch the VASTLY superior Tora! Tora! Tora!, which is a thousand times more historically accurate, AND far more even handed on how it all went down, and how everyone acted.
Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor gets 0.5 out of 5 stars.
I remember watching Tora! Tora! Tora! in a 10th grade Honors World History class and thinking it was the best war movie I'd ever seen. Then I saw Schindler's List.
I liked this movie... ten years ago, when I was still young and naive about movies and the like.
You're right about pretty much everything. About the only good parts in this movie are Cuba Gooding Jr. and Mako (who doesn't get nearly enough screen time). Everything else... isn't good. In fact, it's kind of insulting.
Bay says he was forced to do the romance angle by execs who wanted their own version of Titanic , but I'm not sure about that
3610108 well, schindler's list is an entirely different KIND of war film.
Its like trying to compare Princess Mononoke to Perfect Blue. One's epic fantasy, one's psychological thriller/horror.
I thought Perfect Blue was better, btw
3611366
Fair point. Never carred for horror of any sort, but I get what you mean. Still, I do think List is the better film.
3611898 oh no doubts about that