Have you really seen this? (Pearl Harbor (DVD))

Member Name: itsonlyme

Product:	Pearl Harbor (DVD)
Date:	23/06/01 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 20 minutes of the film

Disadvantages: The rest is wasted

When I see all these fantastic reviews and immense praise about pearl Harbour, I can't help thinking to myself: "Have these people actually seen this film for themselves, or just followed the hype??" How can anyone think this film is a five star wonder? Beats me!

In what must have been a fete beyond any expectations, director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer turn their film Pearl Harbor into a glossy excuse to use age-old melodrama with huge special effects. $145 million was spent on this film, and every penny can be felt in the roaring and exciting attack on Pearl Harbor, leaving nothing for a couple needed rewrites on the script by Randall Wallace...
Few films of such an auspicious guise have been so annoyingly bad. 3,500 American soldiers died on the 7th of December 1941, and there is no doubt that Bay and Bruckheimer have a reverence to their deaths, but nothing in the film conveys this. When the attack on the harbor finally comes, the audience is introduced to hundreds of secondary actors whose stories were unimportant compared to the film's leads. Even the one subplot of any substance, that of the first African American to receive the Navy Cross Dorie Miller (played here by Gooding, Jr.), reeks of political correctness.

Bay and Bruckheimer seem quite content in their historical accuracy, or lack thereof. Beyond the mere fact that they completely disregard the time and geographical implications of the bombing -- according to this film, children were playing softball directly before the bombing (at 6:00am on a Sunday morning) and an airplane hanger owner is unaware of the bombing though he is just a few miles away -- the real effort must have been spent on the film's "all hail America" anthem. Like The Patriot, Pearl Harbor becomes lost in the effort of making Americans seem like saints. The Japanese are stereotyped as emotionless thugs that bombed the U.S. simply because they needed oil (because, y
ou know, war always conserves oil). One memorable moment in the film is when its only Asian-descended Hawaiian is portrayed as an inadvertent aide to the Japanese attack. If I'm not mistaken, it's this same idea that lead to the Japanese-American internment that would later follow.

Yet, I must digress for a moment. There are so many little problems like the tokenism of Miller's saga that nitpicking would take forever to tell in one review. To tell the truth, there are so many big problems, that these little ones actually seem acceptable by comparison.
Though the trailer is perfect in its minute-long depiction of the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in the wee hours of that Sunday morning, the presence of this attack in the movie is merely 40 minutes of the 183-minute movie. The rest is jammed with the expository melodrama and another, less satisfying action sequence (am I the only person that thinks the double standard of showing the bombing of Pearl Harbor through the victims and the raiding Tokyo through the aggressors feels immensely subjective -- and let's not even get into the fact that everything must be tied into a bow without making Americans seem bad for a moment, meaning no note of the bombing of Hiroshima).

Thinking it through, the film might not have been near as overbearing had the melodrama not been so grating. Every step of the story can be traced from the first twenty minutes. The only time that a surprise occurs is when it is so leftfield that you'd think no one in their right mind would actually attempt it. I mean, love triangles never really work in films anyway, but this one, with two people fighting that are meant to remain sympathetic, creates such lack of caring for the audience that even the slightest deviance from expectations feels tedious.

There are many films that Pearl Harbor can be understandably compared to. Though Tora! Tora! Tora! is about the same historical moment, the follow-through
is definitely different. Also, From Here to Eternity shared the time and the melodrama but worked with it in a way that made it intriguing and beautiful -- a story that bent on the Japanese decision to bomb the Hawaiian base. For me, the easiest comparisons are in two other historical films that worked with different moments but were also hurt by their dependence on love triangles. The one that will be mentioned ad nauseum is Titanic, though the comparison is only skin deep -- Titanic has far more to offer than Pearl Harbor. The only thing that really follows in the exact same shoes of Pearl Harbor is the television miniseries North and South. That film, like Pearl Harbor, took what seemed like a lifetime to lose most historical merit in the most contrived romantic story arcs imaginable.

And, like North and South, by the time Pearl Harbor finally plods its way into a finale, the feelings is that every important aspect of a historical chronicle has been lost in banality. This is definitely one movie in which the histrionic emotions of the characters take away from what could have been an otherwise engaging history lesson...Oh what this film could have been!

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