May 24–31, 2001

movies

Crash! Boom! Splat!

Pearl Harbor kicks up a racket and falls on its face.

by Sam Adams

Pearl Harbor

Directed by Michael Bay
A Touchstone release

Run runaway: Affleck and Hartnett pound the pavement.

To say that Michael Bay has become more subtle is like saying that it’s less painful to be hit in the head with a sledgehammer than a truck. Still, credit where credit is due: Compared to the non-stop assault of Bay’s Armageddon or The Rock, Pearl Harbor is positively stately at times. Of course, it’s easy to take your time when you’ve got so much of it — three hours and three minutes, to be precise. Pearl Harbor is a deafening, crashing, clattering bore, but it’s not hateful the way Bay’s previous films have been. Mostly, it’s just dull.

Dull as in the opposite of sharp. Dull as in although the film is halfway over before the first bomb drops on an American ship, so little of note happens in that time it might as well have been compressed to a quarter of its length. It’s impossible to avoid comparing Pearl Harbor to Titanic, but at least James Cameron gave you something to do while you were waiting for the boat to hit that iceberg. Mock the film’s corny dialogue all you want (though for my money the floridity was appropriate to the story); Cameron knows how to take an audience’s pulse. All Bay can do is heap on the clichés with ever-greater force, until the whole towering dungheap collapses under its own weight. For all the time the film expends on what might be called character development, it never gives us a single character we might consider caring about — not a single bloody one.

The actors certainly give it a good shot — Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett as Tennessee boys grown up to be gung-ho Army fliers, and Kate Beckinsale as a nurse whose character never develops beyond her tenacious devotion to the man she loves. And true to the Bruckheimer/Bay strategy of casting legions in the hopes of snaring like-sized audiences, talents as diverse as Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Tom Sizemore, Colm Feore, Jon Voight and Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner pitch in as well. But they quite literally have nothing to play, no more than a handful of stock attributes yanked out of the prop trunk and given a cursory dusting by scriptwriter Randall Wallace (Braveheart ). You know you’re sunk from the first scene, where baby versions of Affleck and Hartnett clamber into a toy cropduster with chalk outlines where the controls should be; the arrow pointing to the steering apparatus is labeled "RUDR." And, as if the joke were too subtle, one boy takes time out to correct the other’s spelling.

The major problem facing any Hollywood screenwriter confronted with the task of writing a story about Pearl Harbor is that you’re dealing with an event that took less than an hour and ended on an unmodulated down note: not exactly the stuff Memorial Day crowds jam the theaters for. Wallace provides a first act by having Affleck fly missions as an American volunteer for the RAF, and tacks on a triumphant finale by closing with an American bombing run on Tokyo four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. These are transparent attempts to a) punch up the first act, and b) send jingoistic crowds out the door with their fists in the air. But then, we’re not talking Grand Illusion here. Any doubts about the validity of war are voiced by the Japanese commanders, who are concurrently preparing for their surprise bombing attack. And any superficial attempts to humanize the Japanese — whether soldiers or American-born — are washed away by Hans Zimmer’s suffocating score and a dramatic zoom-in where Baldwin, his face filling the screen, promises to "wipe out as many of those bastards as I can."

The matter of expectations has to be raised at some point: Is it really fair to expect more from such a blustery big-tent movie? Isn’t the point of such films to make our hearts swell in spite of our heads, to stir our passions even as we tell ourselves we should know better? Well, of course it is. The only problem is Pearl Harbor simply doesn’t work. Bay isn’t interested in calling up real passion. He’s only interested in evoking the ghost of emotions past, relying on gimmicky tricks which work for a second but no longer. If you had a million dollars for every piece of wreckage that flies straight at the camera only to go whomp in the rear speakers, you’d have enough to pay off Pearl Harbor’s $136 million budget, and then some. The pathetically predictable love triangle which develops between the principals is so transparent you can see developments coming a mile away, which unfortunately doesn’t make them arrive any faster. Bay’s 35-minute recreation of the Pearl Harbor attack plays like a half-hour timpani solo, all crescendo and no tune.

There’s probably no force on earth that could prevent the film from being an enormous hit, but every time a film like Pearl Harbor succeeds, it cheapens the medium and guarantees that movies will only get worse. Try that on for infamy.