That Sinking Feeling

Rating: 1/10 (6 June 2001)

CONTAINS SPOILERS
Anyone fancy a fat juicy steak sandwiched between two 4-pound slabs of icing sugar? Of course, if you're vegetarians, you won't even fancy the steak, but then again you probably wouldn't want to see this glorified piece of war movie hokum anyway. Me, I would have much preferred the steak on its own. Is there any possibility of a release of just the footage of the attack on Pearl Harbo(u)r itself? Please.
Because the forty to forty five minute sequence involving the attack was spectacular in the extreme. The fx/action etc were everything you'd expect and more. Superlative.
Sadly, the rest of the movie was so sickly sweet, laced with enough sugar to sink several hundred battleships and shovelled down your throat at frequent intervals throughout.
Let's set all the quibbles about historical inaccuracies aside, because, let's face it, what war movie (or any 'factitious' movie!) doesn't have those? Bend the truth for dramatic license, by all means. But please oh please remember to look up the word dramatic in a dictionary.
What are we left with? Well, a sort of Bermuda Love Triangle in which all sense of drama and plot are lost without trace. Predictable and strenuous to watch. A fraternal bond between two pilots inevitably broken when Pilot A is believed KIA (in his valiant one-man attempt to help our poor RAF boys win the Battle of Britain - where oh where would we have been without Ben Affleck?), Kate Beckinsale's bomb bay inevitably ends up loaded with her own Little Boy, by which time we know that Pilot B will die (heroically) and Ben Affleck will inevitably walk off into the sunset with a family Pilot B made earlier.
All boring enough in and of itself.
To this recipe though, we have to add enough patriotism to fuel several World War Twos, along with some questionable elements which don't sit comfortably at all. The movie highlights the sheer strategic folly of the then US Government, but in doing so it must make reasonably intelligent people wonder whether the intelligence people really were that much in the dark. It's easy to see where the blame is being laid, but where is the real guilt, I wonder? Then there is the portrayal of race relations in the US Navy which doesn't entirely ring true for America in the 40s, at least two decades in advance of Martin Luther King's struggle for equality. Things that make you go hm.
Finally, there is a scene or two which depicts the whole campaign from the Japanese point of view, which are handled relatively sensibly and sensitively, even. However, within the context of all the sugar-coated stars n stripes and love candies, it only serves to highlight the sheer banality of this $139m bomb. Surely there is something of more substance to be said about the 3000 lives that were lost in this episode of history?
What next?
Perhaps a sweet-tooth romantic slushy epic, scored with stirring patriotic themes, and bearing the simple evocative and emotionally powerful title: Hiroshima. Please, God, no.