Great film - only if it 'calls to mind'

Rating: Null/10 (27 May 2001)

Spoilers!
It's a great film. But . . . . it IS cliched. Basically, what you have is a 21st century war propaganda film . . . about WWII. Remember now - after the movie - BUY WAR BONDS!
Or, in other words, if the film works, at points, I think it's really for no other reason than that it was released on Memorial Day. I found it very moving when, toward the end, the dead still entombed in the Arizona Memorial, were mentioned by the narrator. If you identify with the love interest, and clearly the critics are loathe to do so, but where the sets and costumes and 'Francis-style' lighting encourage one to think 1940s . . 1940s, then she becomes a symbol; as you'd expect from a propaganda film. She's not just the 'dame' in the love triangle. Rather, she's the women who lost men in wartime, who served in the nursing core, both at Pearl and so many other places, and so forth. Frankly, I think Private Buckaroo, or Action in the North Atlantic, and Walking in the Sun, and so on, were better propaganda efforts, actually produced during the war. But . . . this is 2001, after all. In Titanic, the tacked on love story represented nothing but the characters, themselves, and badly at that. If Evelyn and the others are seen to represent so many others from that era, then Titanic, it's not.
As for the characters, then, it's difficult to see Danny as a pilot. He doesn't look it any more than Cruise did in the much earlier Bruckheimer-fest of Top Gun (where the tacked on love story, there, was disastrous, and for the career of McGillis, as well - Kelly who?). Now Anthony Edwards, I believed. And one can imagine Rafe, both in England and elsewhere. Old photos from Britain, during the Battle of Britain, show 'fly-boys' who literally look like Hollywood's central-casting image of a fighter pilot - but for real. So Affleck is believable because . . he's that. He's the guy on the poster, telling you about those war bonds. Beckinsale's Evelyn is also nearly believable. But I think I believe the romance and proposal from the stuttering 'Red', much more easily.
Ironically, I found the Doolittle Raid more involving than the sneak attack on Pearl. It's interesting that critics trying to demonstrate some command of history, here and elsewhere, forget conveniently that the attack was a secret, sneak attack. There was no 'warrior code' to be found, anywhere. It was purely a cowardly bombing run on a military base, one asleep and unaware than some particular country was literally now in a shooting war with the US. It was like the 'japs' shooting an unarmed country in the back, as it were. And it surely infuriated the American people - precisely - for that reason. That wasn't propaganda and lies. That was the reality. One could argue Roosevelt 'set it up', and so on, and so forth. But nobody made or forced the Imperial Japanese fleet to bomb the American Pacific Fleet when war had not even been declared. All for the Empire, when it was the very idea of that Japanese Empire which had to be defeated - as it was for Italy and Germany, and their '1000-year empires'. It's why the exploits of the sub crew in Das Boot, an extraordinary film, are such a tragedy - for their individual heroism, their 'imperial' cause rightly reduces them to playing the heavy.
The Doolittle Raid seemed the better of the two key sequences only because more of the details seemed to be revealed. The plane crash in China may have been the most striking sequence. And historically the raid was a huge propaganda victory for the Allies who felt themselves clawing at the cliff of survival in the face of the Axis; and just as mentioned by the film's narrator, here. The raid on Pearl seemed a little light on such details. The smoke, for example, is almost absent when compared with photos and footage of just after the 2nd wave. In reality it looked like a massive tire fire, a firestorm. In the film, it looked like isolated smudge pots. The oil soaked sailors seemed believable. But the immediate rescue efforts seemed a little weak. They had more equipment than that ready to go. But film budgets are film budgets, even if they're huge. And where was the scout plane which led the attack? I thought surely that was the purpose of the opening scene in the duster - because of the visual similarity to the Japanese scout.
Overall, sure . . . Rafe and Danny sink the carriers at Midway - well, if the film continued that long, sure it would have been Rafe. And he'd probably have been piloting the Enola Gay, as well, after having just single-handedly shot down a German mini-jet. Film makers can be excused for 'composite experiencing'. And such cliche as in this film is also - about - other films. It's not honest by itself. It calls . . to mind, other things. But if the critics wanted a good story, as they say, then they wouldn't make such a play about Shawshank - a hopelessly overrated effort - or American Beauty or other such wastes. That they pan this effort says nothing about filmmaking, and everything about agendas. I and others can have our agendas. And I most surely do. All those on imdb.com can have their agendas. And clearly many do. But critics tell us it's about the movies, for them - and they seem even less about the movies than the PR flacks which ginned up the Shawshank count here on this website. It's not so much that this film is 'critic proof'. I doubt few liked Raiders of the Lost Ark when first released. I think the LA guy panned it, only to have to quickly 'amend' his review a month or so, later (Champlin was his name?). It's really - why . .. . critics? I understand the concept. It's the execution that puzzles me. What the heck is a critic if he's just a Clinton-shilling Ebert, or some other slow-witted, mindless zealot who could care less about the steak, and prefers to tell the sizzle how it sounds? You know - guy - what about . . . the actual movie? That's what we're paying to see.