I could at least laugh at Armageddon...

Rating: 1/10 (18 July 2001)

One question continuously plagued me while watching Pearl Harbor (hey, you have to have something to think of when 90 minutes of storyline are painfully stretched into a 180-minute film). That question is: Do Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay genuinely feel they're making a grand, majestic and epic take on a tragic disaster? Everything in the film seems to lead on that they do; the grand scale battle scenes, the slo-mo shots of dying and drowning soldiers, the inflated, empty romance and the running time (so....epic moviemaking means making long films, I guess). If this is to be taken seriously, it's a failure far greater than any Bruckbuster before.
It already starts with its basic premise. Someone said 'Pearl Harbor' , someone thought Titanic and that's it. A disaster rapped inside a 'romance'. Now, I'm not the world's greatest Titanic-fan. But the way the romance and disaster elements are combined here and the banality of the romance itself make the uber-corny Titanic seem like Citizen Kane. The romance in Titanic may have been more than a little cliched, but at least it served a purpose: it gave you characters to follow during the intensity of the sinking of the ship. It Pearl Harbor it does not serve any purpose. It seems the people behind it simply thought in modern day a disaster needed a romance. So out goes most of the interesting historical backround on the attack (which saves the movie from most critique on historical accuracy), the remaining bits reduced to some flashy edited 10-second scenes (in which good actors like Dan Akroyd and Colm Feore are criminally underused). Besides the trite romance it's replaced by some of the most redundant, crappy dia- and monologue ever commited to screen. Oh yeah, and there's the Ben Affleck/ Top Gun angle. Also, for no apparent reason whatsoever, Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character is briefly introduced and gets to pick up a medal. His is an interesting (and true) story, but just why was it included in this film?
Arguably worse than any of its script problems is the battle itself. 40 minutes of completely uninvolving carnage and visual effects. Those effects sure are good, but the sequence in itself neither works as an action sequence, nor as a dramatic representation of the actual events. Note to Michael Bay: lots of explosions (far too many, by the way) do NOT make an action scene. There used to be something like tension because the viewer is taken into the action through characters he or she cares for. Here we get some bangs, a ship sinking and some plane stuff. All cut together is such a way that I doubt anybody knew exactly what was going on, let alone care. The whole scene feels like a 40-minute montage of something like 'America's Greatest Explosions'. Of course, even if it were a satisfying action scene, it would still be terribly patronizing to the real people involved in the attack (as it would reduce their ordeal to mere entertainment). But it would be less patronizing than it is now, because you could have discarded it as mere entertainment. With countless shots of the drowning and dying Bay is clearly establishing what he's going for is something beyond that. He's going for some Saving Private Ryan-style depiction of the horrors of war. But then, he cuts back to the next money shot, thus rendering the foregoing useless. In short; the battle is an incredibly, extraordinary mess.
Isn't there anything good about Pearl Harbor then? Well, apart from those bit-parts (what is Tom Sizemore doing here, anyway?) and some impressive effects, no. Ben Affleck seems bent on replacing Keanu Reeves as rent-a-plank, Josh Hartnett does his best Leonardo DiCaprio impression and Kate Beckinsale looks great (and that's all she does). Furthermore, there's the soft-focus hospital scene (Q: Why not show the real deal? - A: PG-13 rating), the Doolittle raid (Q: It's a Pearl Harbor movie, right? - A: Yes, but the Americans need to win), the utterly senseless prologue, the terrible Hans Zimmer soundtrack and so much more, but you catch my drift.
Pearl Harbour wants to be Titanic. It wants to reduce a tragic disaster to an entertainment blockbuster, but show the horrors at the same time. An already questionable starting point, but even worse is it's total failure at being entertaining at any point. Insulting rubbish.
1/10