"Patriotism" does not justify this miserable script

Rating: 1/10 (23 December 2001)

Let me say first that I really wanted to like this film, despite what I had heard about it. It was much worse than I feared. Jerry Bruckheimer should be exiled to Bombay Films or beyond for producing this overblown piece of garbage and then trying to sell it as a must see patriotic epic.
The first hour of the film contains some of the most stilted, cliche ridden dialog I have been subjected to in years. I know the love story was included as a sort of "chickflick within the guy flick " to appeal to female viewers, but the lady I watched it with kept bursting out laughing at the ridiculous cliches spouted by the contrived characters. (Maybe the target audience is really 13 year old girls.) Ben Afflech was incapable of delivering a convincing Southern accent, and many of his lines sounded like they were delivered in a not very good high school play. This has got to be his worst performance ever. Ditto for Alec Baldwin. Jon Voight has the only very good performance as FDR, but he is "lost at sea" in this one.
What truly amazes me is that this corn ball script ever made it into production.The inclination to inflated, melodramatic dialog that writer Randall Wallace showed in Braveheart runs totally out of control here. Bruckheimer & Bay must have thought that dramatic lighting, sweeping cinematography, great special effects, and a lot of loud, Dances With Wolves style movie music would turn this turgid Harlequin romance into some kind of a patriotic, misty eyed nostalgia piece. Message to Jerry B., "Garbage in, Garbage out!" But what about the much ballyhooed action sequences? Admittedly, they were often exciting and, at times, inspiring, but IMO, Bay & Bruckheimer once again shot themselves in the foot by wretched excess. For example, they spent millions on a very convincing computer generated recreation of the Japanese attack on battleship row, and then proceeded to intercut fake explosions on unmistakably modern US navy ships that happened to be moored in Pearl Harbor at the time they did the shooting. For a movie that touted itself as "as historically accurate as modern technology can make it", this is the equivalent of having the the Nurses drive around 1941 Pearl Harbor in a red 1968 Corvette in the midst of 1939 Fords. Flashy but totally wrong. How could this happen? Bay's explanation on the DVD is revealing. He says when they saw the modern ships moored in the Harbor, they got Navy permission to stage real explosions on them, so they would have "real ships" blowing up, as opposed, (I suppose) to historically accurate, but computer generated ships that they had already spent millions to destroy in such dramatic and convincing fashion. The contradiction of adding modern guided missle destroyers to 1930s battleships apparently did not trouble anyone. If anything, this reveals a total lack of any real passion about producing an accurate historical depiction of events. That was all just BS marketing talk. The irony is that this movie really didn't even need those extra fireworks. If you have seen the film, you know that, if anything, it has more than enough slam bang explosions and the running time is much too long to support the shallow material. So why add the modern ship explosion shots at all? Because, for Jerry Bruckheimer & Michael Bay, there are never enough explosions. There is never enough loud,melodramatic music. There are never enough golden hued Norman Rockwell shots, piled one on top of another, oozing ersatz atmosphere. There can never be enough heavy handed, manipulative dialog. Because they fear if they let off the sensory accelerator for one second, the audience will snap out of it's stupor and realize that this film has the depth and artistry of an over produced 3-minute MTV video stretched to almost 3 hours. More explosions are better than historical accuracy 'cause the kids like 'em and the audience forgets, for a moment, about the very silly script.. Everytime the fireworks stop in this film, the shallow dialogue and endless cliches proved more deadly to this viewer than Japanese torpedos. IMO, on the DVD, Jerry B's lack of real confidence in the film is painfully obvious. He knows it is a turkey. Ditto for Randall Wallace -- he sounds like a defendant on trial. The special effects are sometimes amazing, but they cannot offset the endless, mind numbing mediocrity of the rest of this shallow film. Some people have said, "well this is an important subject, and Hollywood has to make trade offs to popularize the material and attract a wider audience." Fair enough, but there are good Hollywood epics and bad Hollywood epics, This is a really bad one, being sold as a "must see" because of it's historical content.. Using patriotism to sell second rate schlock is disgusting. I have no problem with pop Hollywood renditions of historical events, if they are reasonably well done. I would recommend "Tora, Tora, Tora" any time over this flick. And, IMO, if you want to see a really good Hollywood war movie, set in this historical period, rent "30 Seconds Over Tokyo." It puts "Pearl Harbor" to shame.