A costly, artificial pearl

Rating: Null/10 (19 July 2001)

Though it plumbs the depths of schoolboy heroics and slushy sentimentality, on its completion, the makers of Pearl Harbor probably considered it a successful achievement and $150m well spent. (What they think now, in view of subsequent US box-office disappointment, is another matter.) With their eyes and minds fixed on such forerunners as Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun and even South Pacific (minus the music), producer Jerry Bruckheimer, writer Randall Wallace and director Michael Bay seem to have aimed little higher than a formula action movie targeted at a younger audience.
The love triangle between Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) is embarrassingly banal, with almost every incident and line of dialogue in the relationship thoroughly predictable. There are numerous other trite and clichéd incidents and characters, but the movie's treatment of African-American Dorie Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr), McCawley's spell in the UK with the RAF, the endless "joshing" among the pilots, and its female equivalent among the nurses, are all particularly painful. Alec Baldwin's lines as Lt Col Jimmy Doolittle sound especially stilted, though the Internet reveals that some of them are direct quotes from the war hero himself,
The film improves when it gets away from the fictional characters and their relationships. The scenes in Washington involving Jon Voight as President Roosevelt, those showing the Japanese preparation for the attack, and of course the attack itself with all the SFX stops pulled out are absorbing and exciting. For me, the visually best sequence is the Japanese's planes' take-off for the attack. And the worst - how about our heroes' blood donation being dripped into Coke bottles? (Later, there is a fleeting more routine product-placement for Pepsi.) Despite all the above reservations, the movie has to be seen, if only as an example of mainstream Hollywood cinema.