What form of lunatic is that?

Rating: 4/10 (23 April 2005)

In an early attempt at a war film, Steven Spielberg, as I remember one critic describing it, has laid his first multi-million dollar egg. Which is odd because short war films are some of the first kinds of films that he started making when he was a kid. Maybe it was just a mistake to make it a comedy, because it comes off as this weird mishmash of a war film that crashed into a slapstick comedy and came out bouncing along on three wheels. Sadly, the most fascinating thing about the movie to me is that it stars Slim Pickens and Toshiro Mifune, two giants in film history, and is directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest directors ever, and is still this bad.
I can accept that Spielberg wanted to do something like this for fun and I lose no respect at all for him for making this movie, but there are parts that are so astoundingly bad that it makes me wonder what the original intentions of the film were. It's clear that it was meant to be a spoof not only of old WWII films but also of the hysteria that followed the Pearl Harbor attacks which was generated by a fear that the Japanese were going to strike the mainland. This was not an unreasonable concern at the time, I should think, maybe someday will make a movie about the ridiculous fear that al Qaeda is going to hit America again, although who knows how long it will be until we know whether or not that's an unjustified concern. I don't think it is.
I suppose in retrospect such a worry can be poked fun at, but are we to believe that the Japanese didn't know where Hollywood is located? That they had to send an elite team on land to dress up like Christmas trees to find it? I imagine this was meant to lead into one of the best scenes in the movie, where the Japanese shoot LAND off of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, a hilarious addition to the movie, since the sign really did say HOLLYWOODLAND originally.
Dan Aykroyd's "I am a bug" scene is good, and the movie opens with a clever spoof on Jaws, and there certainly are some great lines in the movie ("This is the craziest son of a bitch I ever saw. How many more do you think are up there?"), but like so many other movies the diamonds are not able to shine very brightly through the rough. On the DVD, it's interesting to see Spielberg talking about the movie, because he expresses some disappointment that it was not as appreciated in America as he had hoped it would be, although they love it in Europe. I wonder what the meaning of that might be