War "Light"

Rating: 4/10 (5 June 2001)

Some pre-opening weekend hype-mongers dubbed "Pearl Harbor" 'Titanic'-meets-'Saving Private Ryan.' I'd be lying if I said it wasn't entertaining. But the action sequences aren't anything close to the complex, calculated sinking luxury liner in Cameron's film or the beginning and ending battle sequences of Spielberg's. Director Michael Bay does nothing groundbreaking here. He shows a lot of improvement since the sloppy "Armageddon," but he still depends too much on special effects and not enough on editing. An example is what could have been the film's money shot--that bomb's-eye-view shot everyone saw in the trailer, resulting in the Arizona being destroyed. The armor-piercing shell drops all the way down into the lower deck, coming to a rest on a million pounds of gunpowder (it's true). According to eyewitnesses, the explosion all but ripped the ship in two pieces, shooting it straight up in the air about twenty feet. Bay does the explosion in one brief, wide shot that doesn't even look real.
Bay tries to one-up Cameron by hiring an Oscar winner, Randall Wallace(`Braveheart') to write his script. But "Pearl Harbor" still feels like it was written by committee, in some Santa Monica Boulevard board room. This is due no doubt to the project not originating with Wallace. He was hired to give a story to Bay's vision. I can imagine the shopping list Bay handed to Wallace: `Write whatever you want, but it has to have these scenes, these shots, in it. And another thing, make it PG-13! Oh and remember, it has to appeal to women AND 14-year-old boys" and so on and so forth. So I don't hold Wallace responsible for the just-average film that ended up on movie screens. A man's got to work, after all. One thing Bay didn't ask, apparently, was to keep it a reasonable length. I could excuse the over three-hour length if the story had moved along a little better.
Bay did get his PG-13 so you're never afraid you're going to see something gruesome. No pun intended, but this factor seriously cripples the movie. Sure there's blood, but the hospital scenes never get more intense than a given episode of "ER." The scene in which Evelyn has to go outside and mark the status of the wounded in lipstick is another missed opportunity. Looking at the dirtied, limping crowd I couldn't see how any one of them was more critically wounded than the other. All I saw was a bunch of men covered with oil, in which case they don't need a nurse, they need a fire hose. There were more disturbing images in Bay's "The Rock," and that movie is practically a comedy! By the time a truly disturbing image comes along, of a net being hoisted out of the water filled with bloody corpses, it seems out of place and overly grisly.
I truly wish this project had been entrusted to someone like John McTiernan, Roger Donaldson, Wolfgang Petersen, Ed Zwick, Joe Johnston, Oliver Stone (well maybe not), Philip Kaufman--anyone who's willing to do something meaningful with this material and not just have Summer blockbuster tunnel vision. Unfortunately, hiring Bay was the only way to justify what staging the two-hour attack would surely cost. Say what you will about the man as a director, but he hasn't had a dud yet. A short career of nothing but box office hits.
I would have much rather seen a complex story that dealt more with the attack itself and who knew what, the inside story, something like Donaldson's "Thirteen Days." I don't need that many special effects. Really, I don't. Save your money. Just give me an engaging, interesting story (think "Hunt for Red October'). With "Pearl Harbor" you get this cumbersome back and forth thing: love story, Japanese planning attack, love story, Naval Intelligence meeting about possibility of an attack, love story, etcetera, etcetera. None of it crosses paths until, and not even then really, the attack itself. After seeing this, I now want to read up more on the actual events. The film makes no serious attempt to explain who knew what and when. All you really come away with, if the film represents the extent of your knowledge of the attack, is that Naval intelligence saw all the signs that an attack was possible, but basically ignored them.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this get nominated for an Academy Award or two. It's just good enough to leave it open for some technical awards like visual effects, sound, editing, things of that nature. But they couldn't possibly nominate this for Best Picture. Could they? Well, consider this. By this time last year two BP nominees, including "Gladiator," the eventual winner, had already been released. And what has there been this year? Exactly. Here's hoping 2001 is a late bloomer.
Grade: C-