This is the end of the "event" movie

Rating: 6/10 (24 July 2001)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Hollywood believes that making a movie is like baking a cake. Like Luc Besson said, "movies at Hollywood are like the pie machine in Chicken Run: you throw the ingredients, press the buttons and a product comes out on the other end". The importance of the cinematographer, the writer, the director, the sound director, the actors is totally irrelevant. This system thinks that the bigger, the better. And the difference between success and failure of a movie lies in how much you are willing to spend. The film being treated as a product and not much else, it all depends on how much money you can make out of it. The rest is totally useless.
The problem with Pearl Harbor is exactly that it was born out of a studio system so capitalist and near-sighted as Hollywood. And this time, they didn't made this one just to cash in at the box office. They were aiming to higher goals: box office smashes, a wide array of public and maybe even glory at the oscars. But Michael Bay is no James Cameron, and they were playing with fire when they decided to repeat the smash success of "Titanic". The comparisons between these two movies are huge, and, although they don't show on the final product, they are quite visible on the way this movie has been made: the thing they really wanted to do was to recreate the bombing of Pearl Harbor in all its 2.35 widescreen Dolby Digital DTS splendor, and Michael Bay, being the bubblegum popcorn director he always has been was the right choice to do this. But, as they noticed, a film doesn't live on only a bombing sequence, so they decided that they had to create a pretext, luring also the sensitive side of the audience, labeled as "women". This is what really gives me the more disgust: this movie was made by the numbers, no art involved, the script filled to the brim with clichés. The film is at all predictable, cold, a product of an industry and not much else. This is what really made me sick throughout.
First part: The way to start every epic movie: the clichéd prologue of the two protagonists when they are still children, having experiences that will influence their lives (see Backdraft and Braveheart, for example). Then we get a love story that takes nearly 5 minutes to start, the essential time (the audience really only wants to see the action). The film rushes slowly to the action sequence, with the always-seen newsreels of war. The sun is always orange, and the cameras are almost always in slow motion. Ben Affleck and a guy I have seen in Trainspotting do also the (very weak) comic relief. But we blink and the movie is already in Hawaii, because we have to get there so that the characters meet their fate, which everyone is predicting. The result of this first part is a handful of clichés which bores everyone who doesn't go to the movies to eat popcorn.
Second Part: The thing everyone has been waiting to see. After all, this is why probably 90% of the audience bought their ticket. The explosions are, of course, massive and huge. Many people die, also in the most gruesome ways. Fire, planes, bullets, water, the 150 million dollars are all there on the screen, in those specially dramatic shots of the bombs falling and the torpedos swimming towards the ships. Many things blow up, but, maybe it's just me, there is such a lack of artistic sense of good taste and suspense that the cinematic event of the summer, which is probably those 45 minutes of bombing leaves the viewer cold. It actually tastes like a fraud. There isn't one single shot I can say that touched me more than the others. Not even that bomb falling, which I see as a different way to show the same thing. The bullets, the explosions, even "The Rock" touched me more than all that collection of stunts. The flying bits are good, but at the same time they fall flat: why do we guess from the very beginning that the both of the protagonists will survive? I don't even ask how did they manage to be shot at during all that time and not being killed in the process. I don't even ask how two planes can lift off and escape. Why do the bad guys never kill the main characters? From the beginning, the bombing of Pearl Harbor doesn't strike us because there is no real sense of risk: all the people that die are not the people we met in the first part, and we know that at least the three main characters will make it to the end.
Third part: America always wins. That's maybe the message they show here. The bombing of pearl harbor was a disaster to the american fleet in the pacific, but america always wins, no matter what. And yes, they will strike back. Hey, even the Japanese admit it's a sleeping giant (which makes us think on the reasons they attacked it). In the final part, which we see as another episode and not as a conclusion (really, the movie could continue on and on, the bombing still looks like it was glued in the middle of the absurd love story, just check out that first dialogue between Rafe and Evelyn). The final sequence is one more statement that America always wins, no matter what, and even if they lost a great deal of troops and boats and planes, they will manage to win. Like they say at one given time: "they lost the battle but they will win the war".
It's things like these that kill the innocence and the sensibility of a movie. The credits haven't started, I was getting out of the theater. Really, it was a great disappointment, which proves that all the waiting was in vain, and that even if they invest millions in one movie they aren't guaranteed to suceed. It was a flop from the expectation point of view, and it nearly missed at the box office: the film merely payed itself and nothing more. But it isn't an unfair defeat: the film is just too damn pretentious, and aimed for sensible and artistic goals that the director wasn't prepared to reach - hey, Michael, no all is about little lights and sunsets. If we are expecting something great from a director who has filmed none other than brainless patriotic action movies which rely on frame rate to state their points, think it over, baby. I think it's time that Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer think over their strategy and think that maybe smaller is better next time (just check out the 2 french "Taxi" movies which made over 16 million viewers in France altogether) - this is the way to do it: give the audience a thing they have never seen, for clichés are starting to lose their appeal. Like they said in Gladiator: "Win the crowd". Good luck on your next effort, Michael and Jerry. Be careful with choices and priorities.

The "event" epic movie, of which Titanic was the last example, has fallen dead here, among the explosions.