PEARL HARBOR (2001) This movie is great...for me to poop on O, how could any non-Scientology-related movie arrive to more twistedly abysmal expectations than Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor? Titanic was big, so everybody wanted to make a movie about the Hindenburg until they remembered that that particular disaster began and ended in less time than it takes to finish a cigarette. Saving Private Ryan was big. Hey, why not combine Titanic and Saving Private Ryan? Brilliant! A love story set against the backdrop of the attack on Pearl Harbor! Oo! Oo! Let's get Michael Bay to direct, his work with Armageddon shows that he knows how to portray the horrors of mass destruction! Holy crap, this movie sucked before it was even made. Thus was the assembly-line monstrosity known as Pearl Harbor born. It wants to be all things to all men, and women. It's not enough for it to be a chick flick that ends as a disaster movie, like Titanic was. It has to add on a love triangle and another hour (a whole other goddamn hour!) at the end, after we've been thoroughly exhausted by the Big Attack, just so it can resolve the love triangle. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett play childhood friends who grow up to be fighter pilots, stationed in Pearl Harbor in 1941. There, they meet a pretty nurse (Kate Beckinsale). Ben falls in love with Kate, managing to simultaneously charm her and get cleared for flight duty with one of those "inspiring" speeches movies like this can't go five minutes without rattling off. Then he goes off to England to do battle with the dastardly Germans, but not before a hilarious moment with a champagne cork, in a scene which unfortunately devolves into schmaltzy shit. There's also a romantic boat ride which ends with slapstick. This movie can't maintain a consistent tone for even one scene! He gives her an origami swan before leaving; she spends so much time playing with the damn thing when he's gone, I half-expected her to be accused of collaborating with the Japanese. So off in Europe, Ben gets shot down over the Cliffs of Dover (good dogfights here, though I admit I couldn't tell the British and German planes apart) and is written off as KIA, paving the way for Josh to horn in, cumulating in another one of those scenes which just feels like it was put together by a team of experts trying to best exploit their target demographic. Hmm, chicks like lovemaking scenes where there are superfluous curtains everywhere (and candles, so long as the curtains don't catch fire). Parachutes stand in for curtains here. She even keeps her bra on during sex; man, I'm glad I wasn't around for the 40's. But Ben's not dead, and he gets back just in time for the Japanese attack, and this love triangle has to be resolved somehow, gee, I wonder how. It's hip to kill the hero these days - the only question is, which one? Once a pregnancy comes into the picture, that question stops being very tough to guess. The only surprise is that this resolution comes not during the attack, but a whole hour afterward. I didn't even mention the drowning sailor who desperately cries out "I can't swim!" (probably shouldn't have joined the Navy, hmm?), or the terribly ill-served supporting cast which includes Dan Aykroyd, Colm Feore, Jon Voight, Mako, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Tom Sizemore. What a crashing waste of the talents of Colm Feore. The movie's centrepiece - and only conceivable excuse for existing - is the more or less real-time depiction of the attack on Pearl Harbor. On the good side, it's spectacular, and thrilling. There is definitely a sense of the chaos of battle, or maybe there's just no well-established sense of where Ben and Josh are or what they're trying to get to when they're running around. It looks and sounds great; on a technical level, it's hard to fault. On the bad side, should mass slaughter on this scale be thrilling? Well, sure, maybe, if it's fiction. Mass slaughter inflicted by aliens, asteroids, comet-spawned tidal waves, sure, that's great fun. But a depiction of such a massacre that actually happened...man, that's not fun. It can be horrifying, disturbing, frightening, saddening, sobering, a lot of interesting things, if done right. It probably shouldn't be a thrill ride, at least not until enough generations have passed for the event to undergo that metamorphosis from a bloody moment of history to a bloody moment of history that only killed people who'd have died of old age by now anyway. Not helping things is the execrably schmaltzy score by Hans Zimmer, which kicks in at painfully obvious times, like when the battle of Pearl Harbor goes from slaughter to "Let's get in our planes and kick some Jap butt!" This guy is rapidly going from the biggest self-plagiarist in Hollywood to the most unlistenable hack, here, truly the Celine Dion of film scorers. I wish this man would just stop. All this aside, if there's a consistent bright spot to be found in this movie, it's that Michael Bay's direction is improving, or at least he was on better behavior here. The seizure-inducing quick-cuts of Armageddon are toned down significantly. There's no goddamn Aerosmith on the soundtrack (though the closing credits does give us the obligatory post-Titanic love song, here done by Faith Hill). No, Bay only really goes batshit on us during the attack scenes where the nurses are caring for the wounded, where he goes gauze-crazy. That upwards ratchet in quality cannot be attributed to the effort of screenwriter Randall Wallace, however. There is a certain larger-than life simplicity of emotion that one expects and even embraces in a movie like Braveheart. But what sounds pretty cool coming from a broadsword-swingin' twelfth-century Scotsman sounds hilarious from a twentieth-century American. The script also shies away from daring to offend anybody, giving us a boxing match between a black man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and a (much larger) white man, watched by a cheering throng of mostly white men. I can buy that the smaller black man wins (though it's a foregone conclusion that this movie would never have the balls to hand his ass to him), but I find it hard to swallow that this happens without a single racial epithet to be heard from the crowd - or the opponent - at any point during or after the match. This is a really progressive bunch of 1941 sailors. This is also the only time we even see this guy before the morning of the attack; he gets a chance to be heroic and it's really hard to care. Maybe unsurprisingly, as its box-office take rapidly dwindled towards zero, Pearl Harbor's ad campaign started to emphasize that it was the big action movie of the summer. Maybe even more unsurprisingly, its video release in the wake of the events of September eleventh drove up the "If you don't watch this movie, you must hate America!" factor. No matter how crass some movies can be, they can never seem to catch up to their ad campaigns. It's hard to watch this movie today without drawing comparisons to what happened to the World Trade Center; I know, it's inevitable that some "epic love story" (read: chick flick that ends like a disaster movie) movie will be made set against that particular backdrop. It's not a question of if, but when. It won't be for a long time, I think. Part of me hopes that I do live to see it happen, because it's entirely possible that even as a withered old geezer, I'll still have a morbid curiosity about the most bafflingly awful movies in existence. A lot of people are pretty critical of Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, for a lot of reasons, by no means all unfair or petty. But just about anybody would have to admit that next to this movie, they're glorious triumphs. Michael Bay's filmmaking techniques might be more restrained here, but Pearl Harbor has more in common with Armageddon than the previously mentioned films...and it lacks Armageddon's hideous, unique anti-charm. Whereas Armageddon was a great bad movie, Pearl Harbor...you know the rest. BACK TO THE P's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE