westley

Pearl Harbor (2001)
Starring Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett
Directed by Michael Bay
Genre: Big-Budget I love American war flick

Crapola! I love this word and this word loves Pearl Harbor. They go hand in hand: Crapola - Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor - Crapola. Crapola is a slang word, a morphed idiom; I call 'em morphioms. I didn't find it in the dictionary but I did find the word crapulous and thought that it sounded awfully made up and if so, why not make up some of my own words. What about 'shitnificent', or 'shittacular', 'crapalanche', or 'crappopotamus'? All of these words, in their own beautifulicious mutatedizzleshnizzle way, describe the movie Pearl Harbor: one of the many torpid, under-the-top productions from producer John Jacob Bruckheimer Schmidt, without the jingle.

This movie has good cinematography, so good in fact, it actually works against the film. There's not one shot throughout the movie that doesn't resemble a post card. The entire movie is 3 hours and 3 minutes of postcards placed one after the other which effectually drowns any semblance to what I view as reality. It sometimes seemed almost like one of those rich, colorful animated Disney films like The Lion King, or Beauty and the Beast. It is in fact a Disney-backed film, and would have probably worked better as an animated feature. With all the cycloramic cinematography, coupled with the miniscule amount of time actually given to fact-telling (about 9%), it's truly a travesty to the history of Pearl Harbor (the battle) in its paint-by-numbers approach to the events. In addition to the lackluster portrayal of events, was the very huge marketing campaign which pretentiously released this movie on Memorial Day, 2001. If I had been a Pearl Harbor survivor and went on a Memorial Day to see this movie, which purported itself to be the definitive commemoration of the events of Dec. 7, 1941, I would have gone kamikaze on the projector.

Two boys are frolicking around in an old crop-duster plane surrounded by wheat fields with the sunset just perfectly illuminating their faces. The house and barn in the background are just perfect, like some rural paradise straight out of Southern Living Magazine. The music is just perfect in that "Songs of America" way that wells up thoughts of Norman Rockwell and old worn-in baseball gloves. You know what I'm talking about, that kinda cheesy Hollywood background mood-music that pulls on our heartstrings. The music plays and the thoughts start rolling through our little minds, goes something like this: Daa nuh nuh (Baseball), duh nuh nuh (Apple pie), daa nuh nuh da nuh (Radio Flyer wagons), duh nuh nuh (Corn on the cob), duh nuh nuh da nuh (Chevrolet, like a rock), dah nuh nuh (America kills Iraq) oops, sorry! This is the opening scene and is the precursor to the cinematic feel and depth of the characters throughout the movie. The boys are playing chicken in the crop-duster pretending that they are flying toward each other. As soon as I saw this, I said to myself, "Aha, I've got it." I knew then exactly what was to come, when, and how these two characters would relate to each other: Ben Affleck (Rafe) is the big brother type to his friend Josh Hartnett (Danny) and will always be there to protect him; they will both become not just pilots, but ace pilots; they will at some point really play chicken in real airplanes. FADE OUT

Next scene opens up with Rafe and Danny flying Navy fighter planes in combat training. The commanding officer orders an end to the combat game and all the pilots commence their landing. But not Rafe and Danny; they start their inevitable flying game of chicken chaos. Told ya! Rafe says, "Go left!", Danny says, "Ok, you go right. Rafe says, "Your right or mine?" Danny says, "Your left, my right!" Rafe says "What?", and at the last minute they avoid each other by a hairbreadth. Man! that was close. I was riveted and then I was even more riveted that they decided to play their game of sky chicken right in front of the controller's tower directly over the navy base. Oh come on, nobody could notice that. INSERT Alec Baldwin. Alec Baldwin (Sergeant Doolittle) reprimands them in that way in all military movies where the Sergeant yells at his men and they sheepishly accept his reproof; all the while staring straight ahead as if they had a stick of dynamite shoved up their asses which will blow up if they make the slightest move. Ahh, but then they glance at their beloved Sergeant from the corner of their eyes and then you reaize really how cute it all is and it's just all shits and giggles.

I have problems accepting the two characters of Rafe and Danny. They don't seem like the men of yore who used to make these kinds of movies, much better ones like "From Here to Eternity" or "In Harm's Way". Guys like Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster. Ben Affleck is too All-American for me. I have no real gripes with Josh Hartnett; he just seems too boyish and he's always squinting and talking with that Hollywood uber-Southern accent right out of the book "Sam Elliott for Dummies". And of course, the squinting. Is he in pain? These guys couldn't compete with the likes of Robert Mitchum. Robert Mitchum was never boyish; when Robert Mitchum was born he was 48 years old and had a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He would kick their ass and say something like, "I'm gonna kick your ass and you're gonna watch me kick your ass, because I'm gonna punch you right in the eyeball, Mister." Now that's cool! Speaking of cigarettes, no one ever smokes in this movie. People back then, especially in the military, smoked cigarettes while they were taking showers.

Bring on the steam machines!

I've had no way to corroborate my theory but I believe the budget for this movie's steam-making capabilities must have run somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.73 million. Just an educated guess. There was so much steam I started wondering if the location was actually shot on Venus. There's steam coming out of the trains (fair enough), coming out of the sidewalk, coming out of mailboxes and trees, coming out of bushes and out of brick walls. Possibly the device of steam is used to replace the lack of steam from the romantic side of the movie, which envelops 91% of the screen time. Kate Beckinsale is Evelyn and plays the love interest of Rafe and Danny. Sounds interesting doesn't it? It's not. Since this movie constantly festers on the romance, it could have had anything as a backdrop; Pearl Harbor being the disaster of choice. It could have centered around an oil-well fire in Hellcat, TX, or around an attack of killer tomatoes, or Johnny getting lost in the well. Any number of things, they just chose Pearl Harbor probably so they could hang out in Hawaii.

I actually downloaded the screenplay of this movie from the Internet. I did this to go through the romantic scenes and determine why they are so vacuous. All in all they are pretty normal and could have worked, I guess. The problem is the acting, which I blame on the direction. You don't create romance by setting two people in a romantic situation and iterating, "Lights, camera, fall in love, ok that's a wrap". It's the subtle nuances of being with someone who makes you feel butterflies in your stomach and conveying that. An awkward glance here or a brief touching on your arm there: the vicissitudes of love. It's the vicissitudes dude, come on! The director of this movie has obviously never fallen in love and has obviously never heard of vicissitudes. One example of a failed love scene: Rafe has to have his regular physical done to be a pilot. He goes to the navy hospital where the vision test is administered by Evelyn, the nurse. He fails and says, "I can't lose my wings, don't take my wings!" He gets fresh and she shoots him with a gargantuan needle right in the butt, she resists him to the point that you know they will fall in love within 45 seconds. The shot of whatever she gave him makes him drunken and he blabbers nonsense, says, "Goodbye", passes out and falls on his face, and then she lets out a big 'ol smile and says something like, "He does have a nice ass." The only thing that could have made this scene worse would have been if she had said, "You had me at 'Goodbye'".

All the supporting actors and actresses in this movie are non-entities. They exist for the sole purpose of reminding us that we do not live alone on this planet. You've got your guy who talks funny, the guy who wears his Goober hat, you've got the guy who actually is Goober, the guy who looks like Doogie Howser's little friend and tries to get all the chicks and inevitably fails, but we don't care. Then there are the girls, who are all nurses and have all taken their acting lessons where they learn to chew gum and file their nails at the same time. I don't want to go much into this, because I think this excerpt from the screenplay succinctly makes the case:

(from screenplay)

Evelyn listens in amusement to BETTY, a cute blonde with

unmissable boobs, and BARBARA, a brunette equally endowed.


BETTY

Do you have trouble with your boobs in

the uniform?



BARBARA

You mean hiding them?



BETTY

Hide them? On a date with pilots? I'm

talking about how you make them show!


SANDRA, another nurse, speaks up.


SANDRA

Loan 'em to me, I'll make 'em show.



BETTY

The boobs or the pilots?



The girls laugh and shove each others' knees; it's a party

wherever they go. But Evelyn can't keep her mind on the

frivolity. She looks out the window and her thoughts drift

away.


Frivolity?? Anyway, Rafe decides to go to Europe to help the British RAF even though we (USA) haven't declared war there yet, because he wants to "matter". Nothing will ever make you "matter" more than killing people with an airplane packed full of bullets and raw courage. This is the scene where Rafe protects Danny by not letting him know that you can volunteer for this mission, but tells him you must be "assigned". Danny is seemingly incapable of knowing otherwise and will stay behind. Oh yeah, Rafe and Evelyn have fallen in love and have been together for 4 weeks but he wants to be the next Red Baron so he leaves, but not without telling her that he loves her and always will, and will come back for her, and then follows that with 2243 more sappy, gushy lines which carry about as much weight as a feather in an infinite vacuum. This is the scene where he tells her he doesn't want sex - "he wants to have something to look forward to" - and that he doesn't want her to see him off at the train station when he goes off to Britain. He does this to see if she will come anyway, because if she does come it means she really loves him. He tells this to Danny right after he just told her he doesn't want to play any mind games.

Rafe is going to London on a train. Hmmm! You don't take a train to London from New York. Oh yeah, I forgot, unless it's the Magical Mystery Tour train which travels across New England into Canada and on into northern Alaska where one of three things must take place:

1) Moses appears with a large staff and parts the waters of the Bering Strait and allows the train to enter in and ride the underwater railroad tracks that were laid there by sea manatees, or

2) ET appears and uses his extraterrestrial magic glow-finger to actually pick up the train and place it within the Eurasian continent, or

3) Peter Pan appears and spreads his magic dust allowing it to fly and the train whishes into northern Mongolia and picks up on the tracks of the Orient Express.

This is when the movie really started losing me and I fought to stay on board. I needed some of that magic Peter Pan dust, or something. Rafe gets shot down later on and apparently, by all accounts, is mistakenly taken for dead. The planes in England take off for battle against the Luftwaffe and Rafe goes down in occupied France, unable to communicate with his unit. But, he is picked up by French fishermen and remains with them for 3 whole months. This is one of those malleable plot contrivances used so often in big-budget movies. It allows a transition from Act I to Act II, but doesn't connect the story in a way we can truly take seriously; it's one of those laugh-out-loud Hollywood gimmicks taught in Gimmicks 101 at film school. Rafe "dies" allowing Danny and Evelyn, at the annoying encouragement from all the supporting cast, to fall in love 3 months after his death. Rafe died in Evelyn's mind and now she must move on. The only people who would really like this movie, and there are some, would be somebody like Courtney. I found her comment on a movie forum site and realized that this is why movies like Pearl Harbor exist. This is taken directly from her post, bad spelling and all:

Courtney:

this is like the greatest movie ever!! its so romantic and just all around great! josh hartnett is sooooo sexy! i luv him! ben too! i cryed from like beging to end it was so sad @ the end when he died! i would really like to meet josh one day but i probley wouldnt b able to talk! well josh ur hott! and thios movie was great!

Well, okay then.

Here's a whirlwind synopsis of events leading up to the actual battle scenes. Rafe comes back to the astonishing surprise that his beloved is now in love with his best friend. Rafe and Danny get in one of those bar fights that result in mass hysteria and everyone runs around with both arms flailing, all to the tune of some Benny Goodman song to remind us that this is still a Disney picture. I've been in a bar fight; they are never like this. Rafe and Danny run from the police and pass out drunk somewhere. Next day they wake up and Japanese Zeros are assailing the harbor.

The battle scenes are good and this is where the cinematography can be appreciated. It seems realistic and we get a real idea of the damage that was done there. This part of the movie belongs in its own sub-movie: an IMAX feature, something like, "Pearl Harbor: Destruction of the Pacific Fleet". The only problem throughout the invasion scenes are the scripted inclusions of Rafe and Danny in each and every scene. They go to the airbase, rally the men, take off in fighter planes and destroy lots of Japanese fighter planes. And oh yeah, they repeat, once again, their skills in chicken when they use it to take out two Japanese fighter planes. The movie really does make it look like the duo is fully responsible for the retreat of the Japanese fleet. This is just wrong. Both characters are completely fictional and should not be written into our history for the sake of fuelling people's desire for action and Bruckheimer's wallet. The real characters like Dorie Miller (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) are included in a way that feels very token, and seems more of an attempt to minimally appease the true historians than anything else. Back to Rafe and Danny: They land their planes and then go to the hospital where they help take care of the wounded. After that, they aid with the rescue of the survivor's and clean up of the harbor. This is just too much of Rafe and Danny to me. I thought maybe next they would actually swim out to the Japanese fleet and fight them in hand-to-hand combat.

FDR declares war on Japan and gives his, "the date that will live in infamy" speech and the movie should have ended here. But, it doesn't. It still has an hour to go. Rafe and Danny receive Purple Hearts from FDR himself and sign up with now Colonel Doolittle and his Raiders to invade Tokyo. This is a movie about Pearl Harbor, not Doolittle's Raiders and, again, Rafe and Danny are fictional characters and should not be written in as real members of the Raiders. I hate this! Of course, Danny dies saving Rafe's life and this allows our primary character to move back in on Evelyn, who is now pregnant with Danny's child. Rafe and Evelyn get married, move back to the south, have the child and name him Danny.

This movie had at that time the biggest pre-production budget of any movie in history, $145,000,000. It's unnerving that a movie like this doesn't try to relate the facts more accurately, or to tell a more poignant story. There's little information given about Japan's motives and there's no mention of the Tripartite Pact. If you don't know any history you won't learn much here. I also have a distaste in my mouth for movies that make everything the U.S. military does seem "heroic" and courageous. I'm sorry that so many people lost their lives there but the truth is that we were totally unprepared at Pearl Harbor and just got our asses kicked. It is documented that shore leaves and leisure time were at an all time high and that many crewmen were not on the ships that day when they should have been. We had the information about a possible attack and didn't make the best of it; I'll leave FDR's fate in the hands of the historians. I think movies like this are dangerous. We sit in the middle of an endless war now and movies like this whip up a dangerous kind of ethnocentric bravado. I'm not anti-American, I'm anti-stupid. This movie is a star-spangled piece of crapola!