The fact that I was actually grateful for the death and destruction of the Pearl Harbor attack should give you some small idea of how excruciating the first half of the movie is. I can sum up the plot exposition in a matter of seconds: Ben Affleck and a squinty-eyed boy are best friends and love to fly so they become pilots. Ben Affleck falls in love with Kate Beckinsale. Squinty falls in love with Kate Beckinsale when they think Ben Affleck is dead. Ben Affleck is not dead. Then the bombs fall.
Yet the movie takes a poky -- and never moving or even interesting -- 5,400 seconds to tell us that. Okay, so there are a few other expository scenes in there, like Japanese generals planning the Pearl Harbor attack, but the not-faintly-romantic romance, leaden with soppy sentiment, eats up most of the time. Lest you think that any human-oriented story would be dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of Pearl Harbor, I remind you -- as I was reminded while watching the movie -- of From Here to Eternity, which manages to focus on human relationships and create believable, sympathetic characters against the same historical backdrop.
Pearl Harbor reeks of other movies. The pilots are right out of Top Gun, the hospital scene recalls Gone With the Wind, the present-day underwater shots of the U.S.S. Arizona echo Titanic. The whole movie has the air of one of those corny old war movies where everyone was flag-snappingly heroic and ambiguity, nuance, and self-examination were banished from the realm. Steam billows from street grates and locomotives, swirling around elegant women and crisply uniformed men, like in countless black-and-white movies.
Despite its clear over-reliance on focus groups, test screenings, and what the New York Times critic called "covering their demographic bases" (by gratuitously inserting Cuba Gooding, Jr., for a few useless scenes just to be able to say they have a black character in the film), Pearl Harbor still manages to be offensive. It wrings laughs out of a stutterer. It portrays Japan by having three white-faced, kimonoed women teetering under parasols in front of a temple with Mt. Fuji in the background. Although, actually, that's about analogous to the scenes they show of Pearl Harbor just before the attack: Boy Scouts camping out, a Little League game in progress (what Little League team plays at 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning?) while Japanese warplanes zoom overhead. I mean, why not have a housewife in an apron pulling an apple pie out of the oven as bombers buzz her house?
Pearl Harbor felt a lot to me like those grand epics they used to make, throwing every star they could lay their hands on in, even if just for a few seconds, something like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. Alec Baldwin chomps his way through a short appearance as Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, and an unrecognizable Jon Voight does FDR (including a ludicrous pep talk/rebuke to his top military men, when he hauls himself out of his wheelchair and snaps his leg braces straight while snarling, "Don't ever tell me something can't be done"). Even Dan Aykroyd gets screen time, though fortunately he does not try to be funny. Yet no actor can manage to make any kind of impression, whether because most of the actors aren't that good to begin with or because they're suffocated under lumpy, clichéd dialogue and bombastic special effects. All you notice is that it's Alec Baldwin or Dan Aykroyd or, at worst, you notice that Squinty Boy's idea of a Southern accent is doing a bad Elvis impersonation.
Ben Affleck plays a movie star rather than a combat pilot: always perfectly posed with gleaming white teeth; even the dirt and grease on his face just serve to accentuate his cheekbones and jawline. You never believe for a second that he really dies when you're meant to -- and therefore you feel nothing -- because it's only an hour into the movie and there's no way the star dies one-third of the way through the movie. It's like when Ben and Squinty and a Generic Compadre scramble into some planes to chase the Japanese bombers that are hitting Pearl Harbor: you know Generic Compadre is toast because someone has to die to illustrate the danger but it can't be either of our heroes. I kept thinking of the character in Hot Shots nicknamed "Dead Meat."
The battle scenes, though, are breathtaking -- though they go on just a little too long and stray into incredulity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, at the center of the movie thematically, chronologically, and emotionally, is stunningly depicted. The closest the movie ever gets to true emotion is watching water close over the heads of the men trapped in the U.S.S. Arizona (and maybe I felt the emotion more because I've been to the memorial over the Arizona -- a profoundly disturbing experience even for an 11-year-old who knew almost nothing about the Pacific Theater side of WWII -- than because of anything the movie itself did). Even the way things blow up is horribly mesmerizing: the shot you see in the trailers tracking a bomb all the way from plane to target is tremendously effective, and the sight of a ship visibly buckling with an explosion is wrenching.
The music assaults us in the same way that the Japanese assaulted Pearl Harbor, mercilessly bombarding our ears and attempting to blast our emotional reactions into submission. But we are strong, brave Americans, and we rise into revolt and strike back at the score... well, we can't really lead a raid to undermine the score the way Col. Doolittle led a raid on Tokyo. But we must resist nonetheless in more subtle ways.
Speaking of subtlety, there ain't none, so don't look for it. Pearl Harbor was written by (Duke alum) Randall Wallace, who also wrote Braveheart, and "They can never take our freedom!" is a paragon of restrained understatement next to half of what comes out of the characters' mouths here. It's the kind of movie where a guy says with stoic courage, "If trouble comes lookin' for me, I'm ready for it."
Oh gosh, I could go on, but I think you get the idea. I'm sure most people are going to see this anyway, because there's practically no avoiding it. My recommendation: get to the show an hour late. You'll miss the worst part, still be able to understand the plot, and have only half an hour to wait before you get to the good part.
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