Pearl Harbor ««½
PG-13, 183m. 2001
Cast & Credits: Ben Affleck (Capt. Rafe McCawley), Josh Hartnett (Capt. Danny Walker), Kate Beckinsale (Nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Petty Officer Doris 'Dorie' Miller), Jon Voight (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Alec Baldwin (Lt. Col. James 'Jimmy' Doolittle), Tom Sizemore (Sgt. Earl Sistern). Screenplay by Randall Wallace. Directed by Michael Bay.
I experienced a couple emotions watching Tora, Tora, Tora; the 1970 definitive movie that today is most likely viewed as a war documentary that covered the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American perspectives.
I was angry at how Japanese pilots cheered in victory as American warships exploded. I was disgusted at how our forces and top officials refused to heed any warnings that a possible attack on American soil could happen.
Watching Tora, Tora, Tora was like seeing your favorite baseball or football team lose either the World Series or the Super Bowl. I almost felt like yelling at the television set during one scene when an officer at a radar control center assumes that a giant mass of blips on his screen is a group of B-52 bombers flying in that fateful morning and decides not to report it. Seeing our soldiers burning to death at the hands of the enemy frankly made me want to go out and kick some ass.
Those kinds of raw emotions are what’s missing from Pearl Harbor; producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s and director Michael Bay’s (Armageddon - 1998) latest big budget collaboration (perhaps I should say conflagration) and recreation of “the day that will live in infamy.”
Screenwriter Randall Wallace (Braveheart - 1995) incorporates a couple of subplots seen in Tora, Tora, Tora and turning their true stories into a fictional three-hour movie. One is where two American pilots get in their planes and shoot down a few Japanese fighters. The other is about the African American naval cook who took over a gun turret.
Those two fictional pilot’s names in Pearl Harbor are Rafe Mccauley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) whose lives are linked to the affections of a young nurse (Kate Beckinsale).
The story of the African American belongs to Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire – 1996) who plays Dorrie Miller; a naval cook who in real life was never allowed to fire a weapon and was later awarded a medal for bravery for shooting down two fighters.
I felt like I should be cheering for Mccauley and Walker as they lead Japanese zeros to a waiting tower with American snipers. The sounds of applause though are strangely absent as are the tears for the 2,400 American souls lined up in flag draped coffins inside a hangar.
Pearl Harbor is not like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) where the D-Day invasion provided us with either an impending sense of doom or hope that such battles wouldn’t happen.
The film is an unmoving love story with no suspense recycled out of countless made-for-TV movies about the subject. The only moments of interest is when Pearl Harbor veers away from the love triangle and the friendship between the two pals and concentrates more on the war and the situation even if some, perhaps all of it, is imagined.
What I’ll remember most about the picture is, of course, the vivid attack itself, the recreation of President Roosevelt’s (Jon Voight) address to Congress and the last hour of the movie that deals with the air raid over Tokyo led by Alec Baldwin’s Doolittle who gives the film’s best performance.
If there is a valid reason as to why this movie was made it is probably because filmmakers today can recreate horrific battle sequences on computers instead of using models like they did in 1970.
In Saving Private Ryan, there was a certain sense of admiration and tribute felt for the men who died trying to take that beach in Normandy. The same should be said for the more than 2,400 servicemen who lost their lives almost sixty years ago in Hawaii.
What Bruckheimer and Bay have done, however, is turn one of the nation’s saddest debacles into a big budget spectacle in hopes of bringing in millions at the box office.
Pearl Harbor is not a popcorn movie except maybe to those not young enough to understand the fateful events that day and marvel at the sights of explosions and aerial dogfights provided by George Lucas’ special effects gurus at Industrial Light and Magic. The film is a failure on both an entertaining and historical perspective.
Years from now, my little nephew will probably ask me if there are any movies out there about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
My answer to that will be to skip Pearl Harbor the movie, and either rent Tora, Tora, Tora or some National Geographic documentary on the subject where it’s almost certain he’s going to learn something.
©5/25/01
PG-13, 183m. 2001
Cast & Credits: Ben Affleck (Capt. Rafe McCawley), Josh Hartnett (Capt. Danny Walker), Kate Beckinsale (Nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Petty Officer Doris 'Dorie' Miller), Jon Voight (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Alec Baldwin (Lt. Col. James 'Jimmy' Doolittle), Tom Sizemore (Sgt. Earl Sistern). Screenplay by Randall Wallace. Directed by Michael Bay.
I was angry at how Japanese pilots cheered in victory as American warships exploded. I was disgusted at how our forces and top officials refused to heed any warnings that a possible attack on American soil could happen.
Watching Tora, Tora, Tora was like seeing your favorite baseball or football team lose either the World Series or the Super Bowl. I almost felt like yelling at the television set during one scene when an officer at a radar control center assumes that a giant mass of blips on his screen is a group of B-52 bombers flying in that fateful morning and decides not to report it. Seeing our soldiers burning to death at the hands of the enemy frankly made me want to go out and kick some ass.
Those kinds of raw emotions are what’s missing from Pearl Harbor; producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s and director Michael Bay’s (Armageddon - 1998) latest big budget collaboration (perhaps I should say conflagration) and recreation of “the day that will live in infamy.”
Screenwriter Randall Wallace (Braveheart - 1995) incorporates a couple of subplots seen in Tora, Tora, Tora and turning their true stories into a fictional three-hour movie. One is where two American pilots get in their planes and shoot down a few Japanese fighters. The other is about the African American naval cook who took over a gun turret.
Those two fictional pilot’s names in Pearl Harbor are Rafe Mccauley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) whose lives are linked to the affections of a young nurse (Kate Beckinsale).
The story of the African American belongs to Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire – 1996) who plays Dorrie Miller; a naval cook who in real life was never allowed to fire a weapon and was later awarded a medal for bravery for shooting down two fighters.
I felt like I should be cheering for Mccauley and Walker as they lead Japanese zeros to a waiting tower with American snipers. The sounds of applause though are strangely absent as are the tears for the 2,400 American souls lined up in flag draped coffins inside a hangar.
Pearl Harbor is not like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) where the D-Day invasion provided us with either an impending sense of doom or hope that such battles wouldn’t happen.
The film is an unmoving love story with no suspense recycled out of countless made-for-TV movies about the subject. The only moments of interest is when Pearl Harbor veers away from the love triangle and the friendship between the two pals and concentrates more on the war and the situation even if some, perhaps all of it, is imagined.
What I’ll remember most about the picture is, of course, the vivid attack itself, the recreation of President Roosevelt’s (Jon Voight) address to Congress and the last hour of the movie that deals with the air raid over Tokyo led by Alec Baldwin’s Doolittle who gives the film’s best performance.
If there is a valid reason as to why this movie was made it is probably because filmmakers today can recreate horrific battle sequences on computers instead of using models like they did in 1970.
In Saving Private Ryan, there was a certain sense of admiration and tribute felt for the men who died trying to take that beach in Normandy. The same should be said for the more than 2,400 servicemen who lost their lives almost sixty years ago in Hawaii.
What Bruckheimer and Bay have done, however, is turn one of the nation’s saddest debacles into a big budget spectacle in hopes of bringing in millions at the box office.
Pearl Harbor is not a popcorn movie except maybe to those not young enough to understand the fateful events that day and marvel at the sights of explosions and aerial dogfights provided by George Lucas’ special effects gurus at Industrial Light and Magic. The film is a failure on both an entertaining and historical perspective.
Years from now, my little nephew will probably ask me if there are any movies out there about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
My answer to that will be to skip Pearl Harbor the movie, and either rent Tora, Tora, Tora or some National Geographic documentary on the subject where it’s almost certain he’s going to learn something.
©5/25/01
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