Interesting failure

Rating: 2/10 (21 January 2019)

This is a bad movie. Don't watch it for an enjoyable viewing experience. But it's actually enjoyable to analyze the reasons for the failure - 1941 fails, but fails in a somewhat interesting way that is worth discussing, especially for industry people.
First, it fails because of a lack of any appealing main characters. The most compelling characters are Belushi's crazed pilot and the character of General Stilwell. Robert Stack's onscreen portrayal of Stilwell is actually reasonably faithful to the real man, who was a much more interesting personality than he appears to be in this strange film. The fact that 1941 treated Stilwell with respect is one of the very few things I liked about it. That said, audiences need an appealing main protagonist to root for and this movie doesn't have any. From the first moments we see bizarre and apparently very stupid people running around, getting into fights, and generally behaving badly.
That gets to the second point, which is that the movie is just tonally off from the very beginning. I get the humorous allusion to Jaws, but it's very discordant to see that in this historical setting. Fundamentally, although the panic in California after Pearl Harbor certainly had its humorous aspects, the fact is that the Pearl Harbor attack killed thousands of people by drowning, fire and other very cruel ways, not to mention that it was the opening phase of a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and ultimately literally tens of millions of other people. I think Spielberg on some level realized that doing WWII as a comedy just didn't work and his serious treatments of the war, especially Empire of the Sun, have been some of his greatest successes as a director. There is actually more effective comedy in "Empire" and in "Saving Private Ryan" than there is here, and the reason it's more effective is because it doesn't deny the seriousness and suffering of the war.
Third, the movie is obsessed with craft and effects. Of course everyone knows now that Spielberg is an effects master and he was developing his skills here, but it just feels wrong for a silly film like this, it makes everything look overdone, like the nightclub fight scene that becomes ridiculously elaborate and goes on way too long. Actually, there is incredible costume and hair work in these scenes; the 1940s look is dead on. The cinematography and sequencing is good too. But none of this matters because the actors are all cardboard cutouts that we don't care about. There's no heart, no humanity.
Fourth, the writing is remarkably bad. Zemeckis, Gale, Milius: these are big names with big credits. How did they mess this up so badly? Were they on drugs? Were they too inexperienced to know what they were doing? Everything about it is just cliched and an insult to the intelligence from the very first scene. Hell, I've never written a screenplay and everyone has to learn somehow, but I'm pretty confident that if I sat down to write one today I could do better than this. At least I know that you have to establish sympathetic characters, and just having actors scream at the camera isn't inherently funny - the montage of screaming actors in the end credits must be one of the most cringey sequences ever put on film. Just why, Stephen? Why?
Fifth, without question the worst kind of movie for audiences is the unfunny comedy. Laughter is wonderful and one of the best parts of being alive, and it's worth a ticket price just to escape our problems for a couple of hours. But the unfunny comedy doesn't deliver, and the disappointment is like a kick in the stomach. 1941 isn't funny, and the harder it tries to be the less it is. I watched this film with a completely open mind and no preconceptions; I'd heard it was bad but I love many films that were critically panned so I really had no idea what to expect. There was no relief. The comedy scenes just flop lifelessly, like a dead horse blown up with compressed air. Belushi and Aykroyd try their best but can't breathe any energy into the mess.
Personally I only laughed one time - for some reason, the scene where Aykroyd's character gets hit in the head and starts babbling about refrigerators did strike me as funny in an absurdist way. But that was literally the only time. The rest of the run time I was just marveling at how awful the film was and wondering how such a fiasco could happen with so many talented people involved.
Sixth, there are some clumsy political points here that seem shoved in to neutralize what is, by 2018 standards, some pretty jaw-dropping racism and sexism. The women in the film are basically plastic dolls and the minority characters seem to be just shoved in for political correctness points (although nobody thought in those terms in the early 80s). There is a halfhearted narrative about the zoot suit riots (chronologically incorrect), but it comes across so flat and artificial that you end up with less sympathy for the zoot suiters than you had before watching the film.
The movie also can't decide how it feels about the military; there is a lot of late 60s gratuitous military bashing, where military people are basically stupid apes who can't do anything right. At the same time though, the movie wants to be patriotic, but in the late 60s counterculture sense where show business hippies somehow love their country more than the Army, despite their very evident self-indulgence. In that sense it reminds the viewer of Stripes, which conveyed the same kind of views but with infinitely more comedic success.
In addition, the Japanese and Germans are ridiculous cartoon villains, but there isn't any comedy to be found there either, and how the heck did Toshiro Mifune get talked into taking part in this train wreck?
At times when watching 1941 you feel that you are watching a filmed comic book, and not a very well written comic book at that - the characters are equally shallow, and the humor is similar.
It's hard to find good points, but as an aviation buff I did enjoy the aircraft photography. And John Williams' score work, contrary to what others have said, is just as excellent here as in many other Spielberg films.
At the end of the day, I wanted to see this because of the people involved and because of curiosity; like almost everyone else on the planet, I'm well familiar with the better Spielberg films and just wanted to know about this one. But I wasn't missing anything. For most people, 1941 isn't worth your time; feel free to give this epic fail a miss.