Japs One, Yanks Nil

Rating: 5/10 (6 June 2009)

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was one of the most important events in twentieth-century history, but from an American perspective it is a difficult one to film. The Japanese fly in, they sink the American ships, they fly out again. Japs one, Yanks nil.
No American audience is likely to take kindly to a film which ends with that particular scoreline. Although the attack was not as decisive a victory as the Japanese high command had been hoping for (only two out of eight American battleships, the USS Arizona and the USS Oklahoma, were permanently put out of action), it was nevertheless an American defeat. The solution adopted by producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay was to make the attack itself the central act of a three-act drama.
Act I, hoping to copy the "Titanic" formula of adding a fictional human-interest story to the spectacular recreation of a real historical event, deals with a love triangle between two American pilots and a Navy nurse. The story opens early in 1941 when Lieutenant Rafe McCawley, an American Army Air Force pilot, volunteers to serve with the Royal Air Force's Eagle Squadrons. Later, he is shot down in combat over the English Channel and is presumed killed in action. In fact, he has survived, and after three months in occupied France returns to his base at Pearl Harbor. (Exactly why he did not return to his squadron in Britain is not explained). Unfortunately, two people are less than overjoyed to see him - his best friend Danny Walker and his girlfriend Evelyn who, presuming him to have died, have commenced an affair during his absence and who make it quite clear that Rafe's unexpected return from the dead will have no effect upon their relationship. Unsurprisingly, this development causes a rift in Rafe and Danny's friendship (although, rather more surprisingly, the rift proves to be only temporary).
Act II deals with the Pearl Harbor attack itself. Act III tells the story of the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, in which Rafe and Danny, by now once again the best of friends despite Danny's continuing affair with Evelyn, take part. (It is not explained how the two, originally fighter pilots, have now learned to fly bombers). According to the film this raid avenged America's defeat at Pearl Harbor and was a major turning-point in the Pacific War. Japs one, Yanks two.
Actually, the Doolittle Raid, although undoubtedly daring, had little effect on the course of the war; the real turning-point came at the Battle of Midway two months later. Indeed, the film, and Jon Voight's rather over-the-top performance, inadvertently left me with the impression that the raid had been a piece of reckless bravado on the part of President Roosevelt who, desperate for a propaganda coup, was prepared to send America's carrier fleet into danger, even though he had been advised that it was needed to defend the West Coast against a possible invasion.
The love-triangle story is unnecessary and overlong- indeed, it is the main reason why the film itself is overlong-, and the attempt to emulate "Titanic" falls flat. Although neither Leonardo di Caprio nor Kate Winslet gave a particularly good performance in that film, at least their characters Jack and Rose were two likable young people that the audience could empathise with. In "Pearl Harbor", by contrast, Danny and Evelyn both come across as thoroughly unlikeable; shallow, self-centred and rather cruel in their treatment of Rafe. (Kate Beckinsale looks gorgeous, but this is not one of her better films). Of the three main characters, Rafe is the only one who engages our sympathy, and even in his case our sympathy is limited by the fact that he is played by the stiff and wooden Ben Affleck, the man with a bigger collection of turkeys than Bernard Matthews.
Probably the most interesting way of making a film about the battle would be to explore the reasons why the Japanese leadership took such an insane gamble, but I suspect that American audiences would not be interested in a film which paid more attention to the enemy side rather than the American one. The portrayal of the Japanese characters is not as hostile as in some earlier films about the Pacific War ("The Purple Heart" being a notorious example) but even so it is rather perfunctory, and there is no serious attempt to trace the origins of the conflict.
The action sequences are good, particularly those depicting the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, and are the main reason why have given the film an average rather than a below-average mark. Nevertheless, there is little else that is good about the film- not the plot line, not the script and not the acting (with a couple of honourable exceptions, notably Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as the black navy cook who unexpectedly proves to be one of the heroes of the attack). Roger Ebert described the film as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7th 1941 the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle". Bay called this the most offensive review he had received in his career, but to me it seems like fair comment. 5/10