Faux Epic

Rating: 3/10 (6 January 2003)

The Jerry Bruckheimer / Michael Bay production PEARL HARBOR is one of the great missed opportunities in the history of American movies. A year before the film's May 25, 2001 opening theater audiences were teased with a series of impressive trailers highlighting spectacular action sequences from the 135 million dollar production. Advance poster art for the film displayed handsome visages of the three main stars with vintage military aircraft flying in the background. Could it be that Michael Bay, the director of such mindless crash and burn spectaculars as THE ROCK and Armageddon , had acquired a gift for epic storytelling? James Cameron, another filmmaker noted more for technical know-how than with a gift for the pen had pulled it off a few years earlier with TITANIC , creating a hugely popular historical romance the likes of which had not been seen since DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and GONE WITH THE WIND. Alas, it was not to be. PEARL HARBOR emerged as an overblown , incredibly mediocre wartime romance. A box office sensation in its first 2 weeks of release , its numbers dwindled drastically as a result of lukewarm reviews and poor word-of mouth. The film seemed to gain a loyal following among the younger generations far removed from the events of December 7, 1941. But to World War 2 veterans and older members of the baby boom era, the picture was looked on as a travesty of history and a totally false depiction of the culture and its times. Randall Wallace's original screenplay had the quality of a sloppy first draft. The paint -by-numbers story of two childhood buddies who join the Airforce , fall in love with the same woman ( a gorgeous Army nurse, naturally! ) and go on to seemingly defend all of Pearl Harbor against the sudden Japanese attack is numbingly predictable. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett portray the two boyhood friends with great earnestness but they are crushed under the weight of a poorly written scenario.
The lovely and talented Kate Beckinsale , the object of the boys' affections, is also wasted in an essentially generic role. In fact the entire supporting cast is one huge blur, everyone playing "types" instead of flesh and blood people. The film's spectacular set piece, the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, is a tour De force of visual and sound effects (for which the movie deservedly won an Academy Award) but it can't save the second hand plot from sinking in its own commonplaceness. I wanted to like PEARL HARBOR. Making a movie , large or small can be an enormous task and it's amazing when a project is completed that fulfills even half of what the filmmakers intended. But the creators of PEARL HARBOR announced the importance of their brainchild early on , and the critics were armed on opening day.
In this case the critics were right. PEARL HARBOR is the frivolous product of a costly, uninspired imagination.