If the Doolittle Raid, why not Hiroshima?

Rating: Null/10 (15 August 2001)

(This contains no spoilers about the love story. I'm assuming, though, that most viewers know some of the historical events).
Mixed feelings about this movie. A terrible and memorable time in US history. Terrific special effects, beautiful photography, gripping and hair-raising attack and piloting scenes. Could have been much tauter and more cerebral, had the film not bloated itself on the love story in its attempts to combine The Titanic with Saving Private Ryan. The graft diminished it. It didn't have the cleverness of Titanic, and Saving Private Ryan is a far better film; for one thing, it did not condescend to the audience by trying to sanitize the violence and grisly mayhem that is war--as Pearl Harbor does. Compare the harrowing opening forty minutes of SPR to the forty minutes of PH's attack scene. Impressive explosions, people scrambling around on sinking ships, just like the Titanic; but few if any severed hands, no faces blown open. No blood in the water even. That's because SPR's main point is that war sucks, and PH's main point, God bless it, is that America emerged victorious. One of the best lines in PH is the one given to Yamamoto: "A brilliant commander would have tried not to go to war in the first place." Straight out of Sun Tzu.
The movie was too long. You've got the two best friends, you've got love story, you've got the Japanese strategies, you've got the love story, you've got the tension in Washington, you've got the love story, you've got the attack, you've got the love story, and then you get the Doolittle Raid and the love story... if you've come this far why not make some reference, SOME reference, God help us, to how America ended the war with the Japanese? But that wasn't heroic. And I guess it wasn't Pearl Harbor, either. Just think of Jacques Aumont, film theorist in _Esthestique du film_: cinema shows "the recorded shadows of objects that are themselves absent. In effect, the cinema has the power to 'make absent' that which it shows." Spot on.