BORA BORA BORA*

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2001)

*My congratulations to Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, I could not resist using this.
Just how good or bad PEARL HARBOR is taken to be will depend on how many films the moviegoer has seen and therefore how large their internal database of war movie cliches is; in other words the more is definitely not the merrier here. Even films that are only set during the WW II era are at risk to be plagiarized, as a plot device of THE CIDER HOUSE RULES shows up. Yet no matter how many they throw into PEARL, it never seems to get interesting. Summer movies are expected to be dumb, but boring? Anyone following Randall Wallace's career should not find this too surprising as BRAVEHEART (with much input from Gibson I suspect) is looking more like the exception from the man who once wrote for the tv show "Hunter." And anyone familiar with Michael Bay's oeuvre should know better than to expect him to realize or care how much work the script needed. He has far more respect for bomb trajectories than story or character development.
What is surprising is that for Jerry Bruckheimer film, it is surprisingly miscast. With characters so uninspiringly written, getting actors that could bring something to the part was essential. Instead, we get the WB Goes to War of choices. Ben Affleck continues to make the case for not being cast as the lead in action roles (REINDEER GAMES and ARMAGEDDON too quickly forgotten, with him taking over the Jack Ryan role yet to come. Yikes!). Compounding this, they cast Josh Hartnett so as not to overshadow him. No worries there as Hartnett seems to be channeling Clint Eastwood, right down to the squint. As to their object of mutual affection, Kate Beckinsale is a fine actress but doesn't have the pep or spark that inspires love triangles.
Just how good this film could have been is evident in the fact that the very same visuals that are wasted on a screenplay that could have been bested by simply shuffling together an old "Love Boat" script with one from "The A Team" were cut together to make one of the best coming attraction trailers of the last ten years. Using Hans Zimmer's THIN RED LINE score ("The Village" for those who want to run out and find it), it suggested in under four minutes the scope, humanity, pathos and majesty this story demands that are not to be found in the bloated three hours of the actual film.
The only real redeeming aspect of this otherwise mind-numbingly boring film is luckily for the filmmakers the raison d'etre the vast majority of ticket buyers are showing up for - the bombing of Pearl Harbor sequence. Clocking in at 35 minutes, it will for some audience members be worth the admission. Torpedoes slam into hulls, bombs crash through decks and all manner of pyrotechnic mayhem is unleashed in a torrent of flying debris. It never approaches the intensity of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN or the scale of THE PHANTOM MENACE, but works on it's own level. Very few shots have the cartoony feel that so much CGI effects impart, the truly sad exception being the explosion of the Battleship Arizona. Great explosion... and unrealistic as hell. Nothing matches the grandeur of the "money shot" from the trailer, the one that follows the bomb from the plane all the way to the deck.
The only problem with this maelstrom is that it has no sense of geography or scale. One never knows where the different locations are in relation to one another and the entire fleet seems to be sitting in one place. Once the attack commences, it seems that same nine planes are unleashing the munitions while the other 270 are off elsewhere, taking pictures perhaps. Not to mention the chronology of events becomes hazy, the first wave indistinguishable from the second. There's a reason most films that deal with large scale assaults, like MIDWAY, use a lot of subtitles to identify the players and locations.
There's an old joke about Deadheads that goes one day at a Greatful Dead concert they ran out of drugs and one Deadhead turns to the other and says "Wow, man, the band really sucks." So goes the joke, so goes PEARL HARBOR. Every year or so a film manages to become through both design and happy accident the beneficiary of want-to-see hype. In PEARL HARBOR's case the usual wave of interest that such hype produces has become a tsunami because of an alignment of unique factors, most notably the absence of any other event films this summer that appeal to such a broad range of sex and ages. What does any of this have to do with how good a film PEARL HARBOR is? Nothing, but it will explain why two days after seeing it very little will be memorable and why years down the road battle sequences aside the movie will then seem pretty lame. In other words, "Wow, dude, the movie really sucks."