Butchering History For Profit

Rating: 2/10 (24 November 2003)

There is apparently nothing in the march of the history of these United States that some flunkie in Hollywood will not co-opt, manipulate and then corrupt. The 2001 edition of Pearl Harbor is a classic example of throwing huge money at a project in the hope that some of it will stick.
There is really only one way to view this movie and that is to see it in the Director's Cut: some very explicit profanity and some very gruesome gore is included in that version, and when combined with the magnificent portrayals of the nurses, led by Kate Beckinsale, it makes this extraordinary failure bearable to watch. Having been required to see it four times, for reviewing purposes, constitutes 'cruel and unusual punishment.' The film churns the true history of the country as if it was raw milk being prepared for butter.
The script is a fraud. From conversations with men and women who were actually there, at Pearl Harbor, on that hideous day in 1941, I can say that the portrayals of the pilots as being 'goody two shoes' kinds of guys were wholly inappropriate. There's hardly a cigarette to be seen in the course of Pearl Harbor, when in fact seventy-five to eighty percent of those people who were depicted in this sham, were smokers.
The way the director and the costumers "tart up" the nurses is despicable. They were Navy nurses, not saints, and not Brooklynite bimbo girls. Jamie King is great as the goofy runaway kid, Betty, and Kate Beckinsale is the only reason to see this movie more than once.
She does, in fact, carry the whole plot line of the movie. The rest of it is little more than Hollywood-style historical butchery, for profit. In the time leading up to the December 7th attack, which covers almost all of 1941, there is not one indication of how fervent and widespread was the popular opposition to the "interventionist" views of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his kitchen cabinet, who are not even portrayed. The America First Committee, which organized huge rallies against having the United States get embroiled in the war between Germany and Great Britain, featured members as diverse as Gore Vidal and John F. Kennedy. Public sentiment was overwhelmingly against getting involved in the European war's bloodshed, and there were many leaders in the military who questioned giving the British any war materiel: not because they liked Adolph Hitler or Benito Mussolini, but precisely because they were watching the rise of Japanese militarism with growing alarm. Painting Franklin Delano Roosevelt as some kind of a secular political saint, in this movie, is another brutal re-rendering of the true history.
Pearl Harbor is lauded for its "representations" of the aerial attack on the Pacific fleet. They are technically brilliant. One survivor of Pearl Harbor, who was a mere stripling youth of 18 and 1/2 on his first posting for the Army, told me that after seeing the movie he felt "dirty." He said the way the violence was glamorized amounted to a kind of pornographic treatment.
He said that the panic and confusion of that day was barely touched on in the movie, and he felt cheated by the whole experience. After four complete viewings of this movie, so do I.