Better than "Armageddon", I guess...

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2001)

Michael Bay is a filmmaker whose ineptitude knows no bounds. It's really astounding to me that a guy of such limited ability gets these huge budgets and choice summertime opening weekends.
With "Pearl Harbor", he has once again employed his standard bag of tricks - lots of noise and plenty of special effects in place of any substance, jingoistic patriotism in place of any meaning. Of course, this is what a vast portion of the movie-going public loves, so I guess his budgets shouldn't be surprising at all.
To call this movie a comic-book version of the early days of World War II would be insulting to the comic book medium. The intent is for "Pearl Harbor" to be a "Titanic"-style tragic love story. The flaw with this plan is that it's built on characters whose only distinguishing characteristics are their names. I never got a chance to care about which of the two flyboys the nurse would choose - the phrase "love triangle" applied to the movie is accurate in that it's two-dimensional like a triangle, inaccurate in that I didn't ever get a sense of the characters being in love.
The centerpiece of the film is, of course, the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. Bay's staging of the event has at least one merit: it reminds us of the brilliance of Steven Spielberg's D-Day invasion sequence in "Saving Private Ryan" by being so limp in comparison. Where Spielberg was able to introduce method and meaning to the madness of his battle scenes, Bay merely gives us dozens upon dozens of explosions, and shot after shot of Japanese planes firing their torpedos. What could have and should have been a memorable, virtuoso Hollywood battle scene instead winds up playing like it was put together with stock footage.
Blame for the picture's stupidity can't rest entirely on Bay's shoulders, of course. The writer, Randall Wallace, must take his lumps as well. Not only is every twist and turn of the plot as predictable as the sun rising in the east, the dialogue is as bad as in any movie you'll see this year. When the invasion begins, one character brilliantly explains, "I think World War II just started." I wish I had the space to go into detail about how and why that line is one of the most idiotic lines in any film ever, but I shall spare you that particular rant. Desperately trying to show that the Japanese are not just the stock villains of War-era movie serials, he gives us the sad and wise Japanese admiral with fortune-cookie dialogue such as "A truly brilliant man would find a way to avoid war" and "I fear we have done nothing more than awaken a sleeping giant" (which serves the dual purpose of making the Japanese Admiral sad and wise and also reminds the audience that the USA is going to go kick some Japanese booty and get revenge!).
It makes me kind of sad how many people are going to swallow this tripe, go back for seconds and thirds and rave about what a great movie it is. My advice? For less than the price of a matinee admission to "Pearl Harbor" you can go to your local video store, rent "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" and get much better films covering the same events.