Dumb! No, Dumber!!

Rating: Null/10 (25 July 2002)

"Pearl Harbor" was more a comic book than a serious movie. I ignored it when it was in the theaters; however, I finally broke down and wasted three hours to watch it on the Starz channel last night. This movie is so disjointed and wrong-headed it's hard to know where to start. First, the special effects were okay; you can do a lot with computer animation these days. The problem with the special effects was that they lent to the comic book atmosphere of the movie; all those planes crammed into such a small space. Then there was the plot itself. If you're going to do a movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, why do you start out with the Battle of Britain and the Eagle Squadron? In fact, how many movie goers actually know what the Eagle Squadron was? The Doolittle raid on Japan was as out of place as the Battle of Britain. A better opener would have been the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and then China proper. The story of the Chinese suffering under Japanese oppression would have been a far superior lead-in to the events that culminated with the Japanese launching their attack. Leaving the story at the aftermath of the attack would have been far superior to what the director cobbled together. The odd little bits, for example, the fiction of FDR (Jon Voight) pulling himself to a standing position, had no place in a real movie about Pearl Harbor. If they wanted detail they should have shown those radar operators having to walk to a pay phone to report what they had just detected on their system. From what I have read, that was authentic. The bomb's-eye-view of the plunge into the Arizona's forward magazine was plain stupid.
If anyone wants to learn about the attack on Pearl Harbor they should book a flight to Honolulu and go to the Arizona Memorial. The National Park Service can give you more detail and authenticity in twenty minutes than this movie does in three hours. The plane ride to Honolulu is a bit pricier than admission to a movie theater, but you would learn more, would have some fun, and wouldn't feel as if you had been cheated.
I took my daughter and her husband to see the real thing a couple of years ago. They were awe-struck. Then I took them a few miles south, down to Hickam Air Force Base, and showed them the pock-marked dormitories that still stand as a memorial to that day of infamy.