The blockbuster disaster movie dumbed down. -Yes, exactly.

Rating: Null/10 (5 October 2001)

What I liked especially was not the attack on Pearl Harbour but the Battle of Britain footage - confusing, as one would expect from Michael Bay, but it at least made aerial combat look three-dimensional, in a way I'd never seen it look before.
But of course nobody involved in this film cared in the least little bit about the Battle of Britain. "We need it for the plot, we might as well show it..." - the attitude was obvious and it made the footage lifeless. Everything preceding the attack on Pearl Harbour was just killing time. Well, I'd heard as much in advance.
Imagine my surprise when it turned out that the Pearl Harbour attack was just as lifeless, and had just as much the quality of killing time, as everything that had gone before. What's more, it seemed to last just as long. Why were we watching bodies and things then more bodies and more things being blown to bits, again and again - for well over half an hour? More than once I wondered what was going on. Not once does the camera pull far enough away from the digital pyrotechnics to show us how much damage the Japanese were doing, how they were doing it, what they were doing it to, etc.
And that's the whole film in a nutshell. It tells us NOTHING. You could watch the movie from beginning to end and not realise, for instance, that Japan was ALREADY at war when the story opened. It had invaded China and declared war on Britain (and all British colonies and members of the British Commonwealth). The US could reasonably hope to stay neutral, perhaps, but "peace in the Pacific", which a few characters talked about, was past praying for.
(There's a curious attitude to the Japanese here. Obviously, they are the villain, because they WERE the villain - but we're never told why. When we see actual Japanese people they look like brass monuments only recently granted the gifts of speech and movement, joyless in victory and they never saying anything that isn't in the form of a sententious proverb. I see this as a conciliatory gesture towards the modern Japanese, although not a very subtle one.)
Such things as why Japan wanted a war at all, or what they wanted OUT of war (not the same thing), or how they planned the attack and what they meant to do next, or for that matter what ANY nation was doing, are given the briefest mention, if any. I know that this film isn't about military strategy, and it isn't about politics. Fair enough. But what IS it about? Surely not about how the war effects individuals. The Ben Affleck has an almighty military raid fall directly on his head and it makes the barest perceptible dent in his self-absorbed resentment; he is exactly the same after Pearl Harbour as before. So is everyone else, for that matter (excluding those who die). When we watch the raid, does the camera linger in one place long enough for us to get a glimpse of any kind of personal reaction? Never! Maybe once or twice in the hospital, but to compensate the cutting is even more frenetic there than it is outside. Unless you can weave it into a personal story or a political one, the attack on Pearl Harbour is completely devoid of drama. The Japanese come, they bomb, they leave.
So the ENTIRE FILM becomes a kind of a music video montage - pretty shot after pretty shot, Hans Zimmer's score indulging in a kind of pompous mourning over the top of them all, paying no attention to whether the people on screen are kissing or chatting or arguing or killing one another. Even the conversations between characters are montages. Listen closely. The people in this film don't respond to one another, they navigate from one posture to the next.
Ultimately the attack is over. Michael Bay makes one desperate attempt to turn his collage of cinematic calendar shots into an actual film, by tacking on a phoney "resolution". We see a raid on Tokyo (a raid that looks suspiciously like a pointless act of revenge, since nobody can clearly explain what it's meant to achieve). Bay wanted a triumph at the end, however contrived - had the war not ended with something as chilling as atomic bombs falling on populated cities, I believe Bay would have fast-forwarded to 1945. The raid is the occasion of some of the most mindless jingoism I've ever seen. The Russians mastered the art of producing propaganda that seemed to have an effect on its intended audience even though it made no sense; "Pearl Harbour" can't compete with that kind of thing, but the glowing eulogies at the end come dangerously close to collapsing into gibberish.
SPOILER FOLLOWS...
I must also register a protest about that display of competitive heroism on mainland China. No doubt the pilots were brave, but their actions struck me as being of dubious legality. First, they surrender; then, because they don't like the manner in which they're being made prisoners - admittedly with reason - they shoot their captors. They would themselves have been shot had their captors not believed them when they announced that they were laying down arms. The pilot's actions are difficult to admire, even if the scene was too ludicrous and choppy to have a moral viewpoint.he scene was too ludicrous and choppy to have a moral viewpoint.