War, What is it Good for?

Rating: 5/10 (4 June 2001)

What a bunch of resourceful folk the Americans are! Run out of medical markers? No problem, we'll use our lipsticks. Guns too heavy to be placed in fighter planes? What's to worry about, we can use broomsticks and paint them black, thus fooling those Japanese foe.
If Pearl Harbor is anything to go by, America single handedly triumphed in the face of adversity and saved the world from the wrath of Nazi nihilism. Yet, how could the most expensive movie in cinema history manage to take a tragedy like Pearl Harbor and turn it into a cold, prosaic, limp story?
The plot can be summed up in a brief sentence. Two best buddies fall in love with the same woman, go to war, Pearl Harbor gets bombed, one friend gets killed and they live happily ever after Nothing more! It takes three hours for Michael Bay to tell a story that Mills & Boon's would shun with disgust. Bay tells his tale with all the grace of an overlong car advert, replete with slow motion shots and over saturated lighting (did they polish the negative of this film with Mr. Sheen?)
So what do you get for your money? Well, there is the actual bombing which is impressive, but never exciting. How can it be when you don't care about the fate of any of the characters. Bay attempts to throw you into the action, but you feel absolutely no attachment to the events depicted, you sit back and watch the money thrown against the screen. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, where the first thing the audience is thrust into is full out war, Pearl Harbor waits almost two hour until the events ensue. By this point you're so fed up with the movie you just want all of the protagonists to explode along with the bombs. The Stars and Stripes shine with all their might and never lose their patina as shrapnel flies all over the place. In fact, Ben Affleck's hair never loses its gleam as all hell breaks lose. This is war Hollywood style!
It's true to say Pearl Harbor has no heart. It's a testimony to how Hollywood has managed to turn the simple art of filmmaking into a commodity. Having seen how Titanic succeeded in making money out of an actual tragedy, Jerry Bruckheimer took all the ingredients of that film (including love story, long-length and a British actress playing the all American girl) and rehashed it. Ultimately, all the failures of the former are epitomised here, apart from this is worse because the novelty has gone. This film is like the new range of DKNY sunglasses: it exists to make money. For God's sake, look how they've re-edited the film for Japanese and German markets. If this film really had any thing say about the atrocities of December 7th 1941, it would never shy away from profoundly expressing the horror of war. Instead, it knows by blocking out these lucrative foreign markets it stands to never recoup its money. Alas, this is all it boils down to.
What's hurtful are Evelyn's (Kate Beckinsdale) final lines `America suffered and grew stronger through trial we overcame.' Do the words Hiroshima or Nagasaki mean anything to Bay and Bruckheimer? The carnage of America is completely forgotten. But I guess to the people watching the film in some fleabag cinema in Ohio, this is irrelevant. They want to be reminded of what a great nation of people they are; not how they vaporised a civilian population. Enjoy guy's just hand over the cash, sit back and let them tarnish all historical accuracy.