2.8	Torpedoes at the Plausibility Waterline! We're Sinking Fast!

I think my favorite moment in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor is definitely when Admiral Husband Kimmel of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet leaps into the air in bullet-time slow motion and kicks Japan's Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in the throat! No, wait, it's when Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) run helter-skelter through the bowels of the U.S.S. Arizona in an effort to avoid Rose's evil suitor (Billy Zane)! No, no, I have it... it's when Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett take to the air in P-40 Warhawks, clear the skies over Pearl Harbor of Japanese planes, and then fly over the Pacific all the way to Japan, where they locate Tokyo's small thermal exhaust port and blow the city sky-high with their proton torpedoes just before Grand Moff Tojo gives the order to blow up the Phillippines!

"But what's it really like, Scott?"

Let me tell you what Pearl Harbor did to me.

I watched this film in relative peace and quiet. My better half was (wisely) asleep beside me, and I didn't want to wake her with my trademark male-pattern glib vitriol. So I kept it all bottled up inside me until the credits rolled, at which point I calmly turned off the VCR and lay down to go to sleep. Ten minutes later, I just started laughing. I couldn't help myself. Scene after scene replayed themselves in my mind, and I howled like a gutshot hyaena in a nitrous oxide factory. I laughed until I coughed, and kept on laughing. I laughed until I felt like someone had shoved a pound of hot-baked roofing nails up against my rib cage. After ten minutes of this, my amused but alarmed better half finally managed to calm me down, but only temporarily, because a few minutes after that I had a second uncontrollable laughing fit even longer than the first.

Only Michael Bay could turn the greatest defeat in U.S. military history and the tragic catalyst of our entry into the Second World War into the most amazing unintentional comedy I have ever seen.

Full Disclosure

I'm a lay scholar of the Second World War. It was the crux of the entire twentieth century, the event that shaped the world into which I would eventually be born. My private collection of books and materials related to the war tops one hundred volumes and it gets bigger all the time. I've conducted interviews with combat veterans, pieced through war-era records and personal memorabilia, and memorized altogether too much minutiae relating to the cultures, technologies, and personalities of the war years. I'm no Stephen Ambrose, but I know my Potsdam Declarations from my Fallschirmjagers. Which is why I tell you now that if you have ever read a single book on the real history of the Pearl Harbor attack (like Stan Cohen's superlative East Wind Rain) and you still want to see this film, the Imp of the Perverse is blowing sunshine up your ass. Liquor will be required.

The first harbinger of the careless anti-history to come arrives during the opening seconds of the film. Bay starts things off with an ersatz "newsreel" teaser of grainy combat footage splashed behind the looming title '1940.' A bombastic Edward R. Murrow-on-crack voice tells us that Hitler is overrunning Europe. Unfortunately, the footage in the background clearly shows a later-model German tank from 1944-45. As I noted this, I willed the Cynic Within to be silent. I was willing to give Bay & Co. the benefit of the doubt. I was willing to hope that only a nitpicky war-dork would be able to spot the hang-ups in the film.

Somewhere in Critics' Hell, the Imp of the Perverse was laughing his ass off.

The Way We Were, Michael Bay Style

If I were to give you a plot synopsis in the spirit of the film itself, I'd have to hold you down and scream it into your face while a brass band played "The Stars and Stripes Forever". However, until someone invents a Java Applet which can do just that, text will have to suffice. Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett) are childhood buddies from America's heartland who dream of flying. Lo and behold, 1940 rolls around and they're flying P-40s for the Army Air Corps. Rafe is a stand-up-proud-and-tall guy right out of a Norman Rockwell painting who falls for a cute army nurse, Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), and asks her out in a "meet cute" series of events that might be touching if brain-eating monkeys from Greltar VII weren't writing and directing this tripe. Unfortunately for his libido, Rafe ain't about to sit back and let no Nazi creeps fly all over England dropping no bombs, so he volunteers for the Eagle Squadron, a group of American volunteers flying for the Royal Air Force (although the Eagle Squadron was real, it didn't actually accept pilots who were still commissioned officers in the U.S. armed forces, as that would have been, ha HA!, an act of war... but even that won't stop no guy like Rafe, no sir...). Rafe kisses his girl goodbye, promises to be back, and then promptly (bet you didn't see THIS one coming) goes missing in action.

Much weeping ensues. Another "meet cute" ensues, and Rafe's li'l buddy Danny of course hooks up with Evelyn. Many beautiful shots of Hawaiian sunsets and Kate Beckinsale swimming underwater (Not that I mind, but wasn't the bikini invented in 1946?) ensue. Danny and Evelyn foolin' around ensues. Of course, it's right about then that (bet you didn't see THIS one coming) Rafe isn't really dead! And he's coming back! Glory Hallelujah, he has risen! Of course Rafe discovers that Danny and Evelyn have been conjugal co-pilots in his absence, so he and Danny get mean drunk and have a fist-fight before passing out, hung over, beneath the stars. The date is December 6, 1941.

The next morning, a few hundred Japanese aircraft show up over Pearl Harbor and Everything Changes, though you might find yourself wishing that it hadn't.

The View From the Autopsy Table

Where to start?

Pearl Harbor is rococco filmmaking at its most careless, profligate, and shallow. Everything about it reveals the great weight of the egos that must have pressed down upon it... this is the sort of film that has eighteen "producers," fifteen "executive producers," two "presented bys" and not one script editor. Overfilmed, overacted, overwritten, overplayed, and overwrought, this film is like a steamroller for the audience's emotional sensibility. Not one single thing is allowed to be whispered when it can be played by the Boston Pops Orchestra with the volume cranked to "11".

A mention of volume must in turn lead to an examination of the music. The score (by a bevy of different folks) is utterly relentless. Terminator relentless. This is music meant to hold your face to the screen by yanking on your hair. It's always there, telling the audience precisely how to react and what to think. It isn't enough to show two hundred Japanese planes in the air dropping bombs and torpedoes... it isn't enough to show the hands of drowning sailors reaching upward for nonexistant air... the score has to crescendo every ten seconds, and then crescendo its own crescendos. The pounding rhythm of the Klingon-style drums as the Japanese torpedo bombers release their weapons seems to be subliminally thumping, "This is a BAD thing... this is a BAD thing... this is a BAD BAD thing..." as though anyone with two optic nerves and a brainstem couldn't see that for themselves.

The visuals... well, this is a film where almost every shot has to be a MONEY SHOT. Bay can no more let up on the imagery than he can tone down the Ragnarok score. Nothing is understated, nothing is given room to breathe, no scene is any less grandiose than any other. A shot of the characters walking down the street is given as much polished precision and saccharine emotional majesty as a shot of bombs falling toward battleships. Pearl Harbor has no real climax-- it's an entire village of eager little climaxes all looking for a lead-in and a denouement but never finding them.

And the script! The script is the root system of this teetering cliche tree. In the world of Pearl Harbor, people don't just say things when they can pontificate, or orate, or stare into the setting sun while the American flag flutters prominently behind them. Alec Baldwin, as Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle (whom he looks nothing like), is saddled with a particularly embarrassing set of patriotic pronouncements. Damn, folks, but if schlock were cancer, Alec would have tumors the size of watermelons growing on his neck.

For a few brief moments during its eight-year running time (okay, you watch it and report back on how long it seems to YOU) Pearl Harbor actually managed to hold some interest. The bizarre love triangle between Rafe, Danny, and Evelyn isn't as thunderously awful as it could have been (although the moment Evelyn reveals to Rafe that she is pregnant with Danny's baby, you know Danny is a dead, dead man. Oh come on-- you call that a spoiler? Bullwinkle the Moose could out-guess the people behind this movie). The chaotic scenes in the naval hospital where the catty young nurses must suddenly deal with hundreds of seriously injured men (and must take on the responsibility of keeping the fatally injured from taking up bed space) are the best in the film. The much-vaunted "bomb's eye view" battle scenes and explosions have nothing on this. Here for precious few moments in all of the techno-glitz and pyrotechnic stupidity is a real story screaming to be let out of its cage. Blink and you'll miss it.

"Take History and Dignity Out Back and Pop A Cap in Their Asses"

I can only imagine that someone must have said something like that at some point during the planning of this film. Sure, I know-- "Never attribute to malice what can be more easily explained by stupidity." But I want to attribute this entire film to malice. I really, really do.

As the attack on Pearl Harbor begins, Rafe and Danny race back to their airfield and hop into two of the very few remaining P-40s, which are fortunately powered by Contrivance Engines. Thus, when the P-40s trundle across a grassy field at less than 100 knots, trying to reach takeoff speed, the flight of Japanese Zeros closing from behind at more than twice that speed magically never seems to catch up with them. Of course, once off the ground, Rafe and Danny show the dirty Japs what real flying is, and every Japanese pilot in the air mysteriously loses the exquisite competence they had displayed just a few minutes earlier. Dirty dastardly Nips are soon raining all over the landscape! Rafe and Danny blast 'em with machineguns! Pow! Rafe and Danny lead them into small-arms ambushes staged by the plucky ground crew! Bam! Rafe and Danny trick the Zero pilots into flying into one another! Zowie! USA! USA! USA!

But of course, it's not enough for Rafe and Danny to merely blast half the Japanese attackers out of the sky. Nope, mere super-heroism is insufficient for Bay's purposes, whatever they may be. These two guys have to teleport to every relevant portion of the battle's aftermath. Without much explanation, they soon appear at Evelyn's hospital, asking with outthrust chins, "How can we help?" It turns out they can help by giving blood... into Coke bottles. Those of you wondering how they could possibly manage to work a product placement into a movie set in 1941 may now die happy. Shortly after Rafe and Danny give blood for the Coca-Cola Corporation, a poor extra sticks his head into the frame and says that "they" need help to try and cut men out of the sinking ships in the harbor. Without further ado, Rafe and Danny teleport to the upended hull of one of the sinking battleships just in time to hold the hands of dying sailors sticking out of a tiny hole in the steel. I was half-expecting Rafe and Danny to appear in Washington the next day to elbow Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the way and declare war on Japan. However, this scene mostly involves talking, so of course Bay cuts it as short as possible. There probably wasn't time to feature Rafe and Danny speaking. Maybe you can spot them digitally composited into the crowd?

At this point, a filmmaker bound by the Geneva Convention would have been compelled to end the audience's suffering and roll some credits. But there is no such hope in sight here. You'd figure that a film about the Pearl Harbor attack would be about just that... the dashed hopes, the loss of innocence, the shocking chain of incompetence and miscommunication that led to the achievement of Japanese surprise, and the tragedy of nearly three thousand deaths. But no... the attack itself is really just an action centerpiece to a film that meanders like a ten-year-old re-enacting World War II with plastic soldiers. "The Japanese are coming... the Japanese bomb! Americans die! America gets mad... America bombs! Japanese die!" No, before his film finally ends, Michael Bay is determined to show America Striking Back! The last half-hour of this thing is... the Doolittle Raid. I assure you I am not making any of this up.

Great Nimitz's Ghost! Alec Baldwin Doolittle returns and recruits all the surviving Pearl Harbor fighter pilots (including Rafe and Danny) and starts training them to fly B-25s for a reprisal raid on Tokyo. Obviously, this (the recruitment) never happened, and anyone who suggested such an idiotic scheme (Say it with me, now: Fighter pilots fly fighters and bomber pilots fly bombers) would have been demoted to deskwork for the remainder of the war, but not in this film, baby.

The Doolittle Raiders set sail after Rafe and Danny take a tearful parting from Evelyn (while anyone with an IQ over 100 will be chanting "Dead meat! Dead meat! Dead meat!" as they board their plane). The Doolittle Raiders fly to Tokyo in a highly unlikely line abreast formation and bomb the living hell out of it (I think it's important for Bay to somehow show that we blowed 'em up just as good as they bowed us up, even though that's hardly the case) before flying to a dead-stick landing in a rice paddy in occupied China. The film has been spastic before now, but here it positively develops A.D.D. in an effort to squeeze everything in. The downed American pilots have a "heroic" running gunfight with Japanese infantry (Wow! .45 pistols are a hell of a lot more accurate than bolt-action rifles!), and then they get captured, and then they escape, but Danny gets killed in the process (Oh, please... you didn't think the scriptwriter would leave a difficult and potentially compelling plot point for the end when he could just get out of it the cheap and easy way, did you?) and his boxed remains come home to America while Kate Beckinsale's voiceover mutter something about patriotic virtues and then we cut to a shot of Rafe and Evelyn raising Little Danny back in America's Heartland. *Gasp, huff, huff.* Roll credits! Everybody clap! Play the song from the original motion picture soundtrack!

Screw you, Pearl Harbor.

For me, patriotism has never had one damn thing to do with whitewashing the past, masturbating over comic-book versions of ourselves, and getting misty-eyed over dime novel dialogue just because some dope stuck an American flag into the background of the shot. This film is the biggest blank ever fired from a cinematic cannon, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but soundtrack sales and merchandising agreements. It offers little historical context, no human insight, and an all-you-can eat buffet of factual errors and omissions.

I don't need a vapid waste of $135 million to tell me that brave Americans died at Pearl Harbor. I am overawed at the true story of Pearl Harbor and the true stories of the entire war every time I open a book on the subject and read.

I wonder if Michael Bay reads books. I really do.

Dork Cynic | March 2002

Score Breakdown

Direction: Acting: Dialogue: Invention: Soul: Lasting Impact: Average: Final Critical Bias: Final Score:

4.0 4.0 1.8 3.5 3.0 2.0 3.1 - .3 2.8

Visual bombast that steps on your brain and doesn't get off. Nobody was given anything to work with and nobody cared. Have you ever felt ashamed to speak English? It's all precise and grandiose. Not to mention dull as dirt. A Gotterdammerung of saccharine pap. You will try... so hard... to forget you ever saw it... Makes The Rock look like Macbeth. For contrivances above and beyond the call of duty. Deep within Michael Bay's soul lurk a thousand of the biggest, prettiest, 30-second television commercials the world will ever see. I just wish he wouldn't keep dressing them up as movies.