More Real Than Reel, For Much Of Its Length

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2001)

I will always resent what Top Gun did to action movies. You know it by heart: two buddies in the cockpits of state of the art aircraft, making like Thunderbirds, daring do, do or die. What hogwash.
There is some of this --okay, too much of this -- in Pearl Harbor, but the good news is, this is mainly a simple she-has-to-choose love story set against the huge backdrop of history. Many people hold this against it. They say "With one of the pivotal events of the century taking place, the makers act as if this dumb little story of 3 people matters. It doesn't; it's trivial!" Au contraire, my callow young friends. Real Life, versus Reel Life, is made up of the small things. We experience life in macro, while we study it through history in sweeping panorama. To the people living in that time, Pearl Harbor changed their lives, sure, as it does the three main characters here. But the other things they were engaged in continued right along. --The passions, the human folly. Why do people have such a hard time with this movie, and its concessions to this particular level of reality? It is in fact no more or less "real" than many Hollywood films. --It is more real than most. Sure the Top Gun bit is hokey, but the love story, which is where the movie is rooted, rings true, even if a bit familiar.
This movie may tell the story your grandmother or father would never tell you about what they were doing when the planes came. I give it 7 stars.