It's not the history that's bad, it's the story

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2002)

It mystifies me that the complaints against this movie so often center around its lack of historical accuracy. I hate to tell you this, guys, but the movie mostly gets the history right. There's a minor detail wrong here and there, but if somebody who never heard of World War II saw this movie, he would walk away with a very clear picture of what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He would know that the Japanese planned the attack meticulously, that they struck without warning and achieved complete surprise, that the battleships were caught moored in the harbor, that the American carriers were not damaged, that the ARIZONA exploded and the OKLAHOMA capsized. He would even know that the Japanese admiral who planned the attack, Isoroku Yamamoto, had severe doubts about Japan's ability to win the war it was starting.
Perfect historical accuracy was not achieved, but neither was it claimed. The movie never pretended to be anything but a fictional story set against a historical backdrop, and the historical backdrop is perfectly adequate - far better than average for Hollywood. It's the fictional story in the foreground that stinks.
PEARL HARBOR's story is about a love triangle. That's not the problem either. The love triangle is a perfectly good plot device; some of the finest dramas ever made are built on it. But the device can't work by itself. It's a setup for the characters to make dramatic choices. In PEARL HARBOR, the characters in the triangle mostly don't make any choices, and even when they do, the choices are irrelevant. Forces outside the characters themselves set the triangle up; forces outside themselves then resolve it. The characters' own thoughts and feelings don't drive the story.
The arbitrary setup and denouement aren't the only problems with the story, though they are the worst. The movie also presents stupidity as if it were a survival skill. From their boyhood to their adulthood, Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker fly like dummies. This isn't accidental; the movie deliberately paints them as dangerous to themselves and their comrades. In the real world, stupid military pilots die - quickly. World War II aerial warfare was one of the most unforgiving combat arenas in military history (for instance, you could very easily kill yourself without any help from the enemy). What would it have cost to show these fellows as being aces because they were smart? Not only would the movie have been truer to life, but it would have been more fun to watch.
I can't help but sympathize with Cuba Gooding, Jr., who might as well have had "gotta get the black demographic" stamped on his forehead. He has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the actual story; he doesn't interact with any of the main characters meaningfully, and had he been white he would have been written out of the script or, more likely, never written into it in the first place. I have to admire Gooding's professionalism, since he did a good job anyway, even though he must have known he was a token. I hope most of the black viewers had the good sense to feel insulted by the condescending assumption that no black person would have any interest in a story about white people.
At least the bloated budget does achieve the things that bloated budgets can do. The high-dollar acting talent pays off. Ben Affleck's acting is superb; he does pain, resentment and embarrassment very well. He doesn't get a chance to be subtle, but screenwriter Randall Wallace clearly intended Rafe McCawley to be a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Mako does a first-rate Admiral Yamamoto; his lined face and spare figure make him less than a perfect physical match for the real man, but he gets his spirit just right. The visual effects are reasonably good.
PEARL HARBOR was made in an attempt to copy the success of TITANIC. Even the most rabid TITANIC-hater will have to admit, on seeing PEARL HARBOR, that James Cameron could have done a lot worse. He could have made a movie like this one.
Rating: ** out of ****
Recommendation: See it on cable on a slow night.