great action scenes; dreadful story

Rating: Null/10 (2 January 2002)

One can only speculate about how great a part timing plays in determining whether or not any particular film is a success or failure at the box office. I suspect that had `Pearl Harbor' been released three or four months later than it was  in say September rather than June of 2001  it might have been able to ride the wave of renewed American patriotism that accompanied that other Day of Infamy, the September 11th terrorist attacks - and found itself some true financial glory. As it is, the film will probably now enjoy a more lucrative life in its home video incarnation than it might otherwise have done under more normal circumstances. So I guess, in some ways, the film's timing ends up being fortuitous after all.

Even from the start, one could see that `Pearl Harbor' was designed as a bald-faced attempt to replicate the unprecedented success of `Titanic.' One is only amazed at how completely it fails. In both films a simplistic love story has been grafted onto an historic event of monumental tragedy, one that is familiar to the audience beforehand, comes mostly at the end, and offers scads of special effects wizards gainful employment in bringing the episode to life on the screen. In many ways, `Pearl Harbor' is simply the biggest, loudest and costliest example of that strange hybrid genre known as the `chick flick/war movie.' (In this way, I guess filmmakers feel they have the whole date-night crowd covered). Somehow, one expects to find romance on a cruise ship. It feels right there. A romantic story seems somehow less apropos as the foundation for a film on this particular subject. In fact, the love triangle scenario that makes up fully the first half of this film's enormous three-hour running time is of such surpassing banality that one begins to wonder if anyone bothered to read the script before the actors were pushed out in front of the cameras. For it is quite obvious that all the creative minds engaged in bringing this film to completion were focused far more on the massive reconstructed sets, elaborate explosions and jaw dropping special effects than on anything so simple and banal as character development or thematic depth.

It would be hard to imagine three less interesting characters than Rafe (catch the All-American hero name yet!), Danny and Evelyn to serve as the focal point for a film on this important a subject. The first two (played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) are childhood buddies, now turned bomber pilots, who happen to fall in love with the same beautiful nurse (played by Kate Beckinsale). Just think back to the complex characters at the core of `From Here to Eternity.' In that film, so absorbing and grand were those figures and the situations in which they found themselves that the Pearl Harbor attack actually stayed, for the most part, in the background. In `Pearl Harbor,' we are never allowed to forget that the sole purpose for the movie's existence is the attack sequence. Every moment of the first half is painful to watch  from the awkward and silly first meetings, to the sappy and drippy love scenes, to the inevitable fistfight between the two best friends just hours before they will be called upon to demonstrate brotherhood in action for a greater cause. Rick, the main character in `Casablanca,' uttered the famous truism that the travails of three insignificant people don't `amount to a hill of beans' in the face of events of global importance  and that philosophy has never seemed more on the money than in the case of `Pearl Harbor.' But then when you are fretting over making back those untold millions you've lavished on your star-studded production, you don't dare allow yourself to entertain such subversive thoughts. I hate to have to say this but the pasteboard love story that weakly props up `Pearl Harbor' ends up being an insult to both those who survived and those who perished in the holocaust.
What is NOT an insult to their memories, however, is the attack sequence itself. Here the wretched movie almost redeems itself, for not only is this scene breathtakingly realized in its complexity and scope, but it also captures the poignancy of the devastation in amazingly graphic terms. The gruesomeness of much of the death and carnage put before us makes us fully appreciate, for the first time I think, the enormity of the horror and suffering that accompanied that event. `Pearl Harbor' justifies its brilliant excesses by bringing this moment to epic life for a whole generation who has heretofore probably encountered it only as a highlighted study note in some dry high school or college textbook. For a glorious half hour or so, the filmmakers husband all the resources of modern special effects to plunge us into an epochal moment in our nation's history. Herr, indeed, is technological excess employed in a salutary purpose.

The advantage in seeing `Pearl Harbor' on video rather than in the theatre is that, in the latter venue, one could only snooze through the torpid first half and wake refreshed when the bombs started dropping and the guns firing. Now, with the power of the remote in one's hand, one can simply fast forward to all the good parts and leave the sappy ones behind.