even a Spielberg mess has a lot of excellent bits; it's his craziest effort yet, flawed, BIG, and proud of its longevity

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2007)

I'm not sure I'll want to sit too soon again through 1941, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale and John Milius, but I wouldn't trade the experience. Unlike directors nowadays who go BIG and HUGE with action and cheesy comedy and thrills, and their movies end up possibly leaving a really lousy residue from a kind of soulessness (Michael Bay comes immediately to mind), Spielberg may go way over the top, and in the DVD version I saw it goes on far too long (whether or not the special edition solves the problems left in the original 2 hour cut boggles my mind just to think about it), but it never loses a sense of giddy excitement, like a 12 year old boy given free reign over the controls of a nose-thumbing, immature-yet-intelligent big-budget Hollywood action-war-comedy. For more than a few moments watching it, I thought of what Francis Ford Coppola said regarding the making of Apocalypse Now, when he said "we had too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." I wondered how much Spielberg decided to shoot- and shoot and shoot- from the script, though whatever mishaps occur in the picture (and for the most part goes on in the latter half of the film), yet he somehow pulls out a few really extraordinary sequences, and more than few deserved laughs.
It's chaos, basically, when less than a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor the threat of an attack from the Japanese seems imminent. Everybody's up in arms, or at least up in arms with one another (again, the 12 year-old aspect, both with plenty of explosions, weapons firing off, and more than a bit of innuendo), and we're given practically an Altman-esquire view of Los Angeles in this time of wacky despair, even if oddly enough most of what really makes of LA is left away. Then again, any big mash of reality would compact the escapist madhouse Spielberg and his writers intend. Only in a flick like 1941 would you get a bat-s*** pilot (a hilarious John Belushi), a timid but ready average guy with a gigantic machine gun in his backyard (Ned Beatty), a doubting Thomas General who cries when he watches Dumbo (Robert Stack), two army personnel (Tim Matheson and Nancy Allen) who have a deranged courtship involving air travel, and the actual (yet more-so potential) threat to the LA area, a Japanese submarine headed by Colonel Mikamura (Toshrio Mifune, who in a limited role gets to do what he does best- look down-right perturbed). It all leads up to a gigantic- and I do mean gigantic- climax that goes on and on and on with the crazed, war-seeking Americans finally finding their sights at the sub.
Perhaps if Spielberg and his editors decided to try and tighten it up (and again I say this after the extended version, perhaps this is maybe a tad different with the shorter theatrical cut), it would be a much greater rush of insanity in wartime comedy. A topic like the delirium of Americans on the cusp of war is good for a variety of broad styles (if that makes sense), and the cast assembled here is more hit than miss (where else will you get Christopher Lee as a Nazi on a sub who can somehow have no problem communicating with the Japanese speaking Japanese!), with the goofy parts still retaining moments of levity. And the madness that usually unfolds on screen, be it small-time or large scale, gets the right treatment at least on the directorial front. There's a dance-hall sequence involving the main romantic love triangle (I forget all the names, though I remember Treat Williams being involved), where the fighting blends with the dancing and completely absurd homaging to a point of delirious genius, and it's one of Spielberg's greatest single sequences from the 70s. I even got a couple of chuckles at his blatant, irrevocable homages to his previous films (the opening with Jaws, certain shots right from Close Encounters, even a few unintentional allusions to future films).
But again that frigging script, and the abandonment to pull back from the crazily cartoonish atmosphere, sort of damns it in the last section, where more seems to mean better, even when what might be expected (more explosions) doesn't quite come off. It ended up becoming almost an act of annoying the viewer, where already there's been so many scenes of hundreds of people in single shots, stretched into sequences, and grand-standings (Aykroyd's part) and wild flights of fancy, that even the best parts end up becoming mired in the thick of it all. I guess maybe it's meant to almost feel like a war in and of itself, but unlike the Coppola picture I mentioned previously, there isn't a lot of art to come out of the sensationalism, just some fun times to have with friends and a very good sense of humor (mostly a forgiving one). This all being said, however, I wouldn't tell you not to see it, most likely if you're a fan of Spielberg and Zemeckis, and I end up recommending it against my better judgment, or rather I don't recommend if as much as the MUCH better works of the filmmakers, but for a certain comic sensibility it might be real gold. I will remember the zany brilliance, but I also won't be able to shake off the fact that it is the sort of midway minor blunder of a filmmaker right in an awe-inspiring stretch of films. 6.5/10