In time honored fashion, Pearl Harbor chides Depression-era Americans for their naive isolationism and military unreadiness for attack by a foreign power. That might be fair enough-if Pearl Harbor weren’t exactly the kind of movie that leaves Americans ignorant about such matters as why their country might suffer attack by a foreign power.
Brought to you by Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Michael Bay and writer Randall Wallace, Pearl Harbor is a cringe worthily old-fashioned romance that adopts a reverential tone toward the horrors of war, then redeems them with some relatively bloodless derring-do. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett play handsome U.S. pilots and best buddies in an unintending love triangle with a pretty nurse (Kate Beckinsale); all three are witnesses to history when on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bomb the U.S. fleet, killing about 2, 400.
The main characters are strictly cardboard, and Bay brings nothing new to a very familiar story. The scenes of warfare-especially the half-hour Pearl restaging that is the three hour movie’s centerpiece-are handled better and, as far as it goes, even faithful to history. The trouble is that in its eagerness to second conventional wisdom, Pearl Harbor doesn’t go far enough.
Opening with the nostalgic shots of a crop duster in rural, 1920s Tennesee, Pearl Harbor paints an America whose innocence is ripe for dashing, a nation whose maturity can be won only through war; it concludes asserting that World War II began for the U.S. at Pearl Harbor. In Fact, the U.S. had been flouting its nominal neutrality for some time by arming the British, and was already trading fire with German vessels while escorting British supply boats across the Atlantic: War was here in all but name.
A bigger deception, however, is the suggestion that the attack was wholly surprising and unprovoked. While it is true that no evidence supports the conspiracy theory that FDR hid knowledge of a strike at Pearl Harbor, US-Japanese tensions had been rising for a decade, and Roosevelt, despite an uninterested citizenry, was unquestionably eager that the U.S. join the war effort. Japan was long intent on expanding its empire in China and Southeast Asia, but it wasn’t until the summer of ’41 that Roosevelt embargoed shipments of steel, scrap iron, oil and airplane fuel the Japanese depended on, and then abruptly froze all Japanese assets in the U.S.
Japan didn’t want war with the U.S., but historians say FDR calculates such moves to get Japan to shoot first, thus goading the American public into fighting. Pearl Harbor’s suggestion that a trusting U.S. was blindsided by dastardly Japan is hooey: Its peace overtures were arguably as phony as Japan’s last ditch diplomatic pantomimes. Washington knew a strike was imminent, but thought it would fall on Dutch and British holdings in oil-rich Southeast Asia, the source of most of America’s tin and rubber supply.
Obviously, Bay and company aren’t aiming for docudrama. But when you time a movie’s release to the 60th anniversary of the event it is based on, you’re just begging for scrutiny. A legitimate look at Pearl Harbor would require more heft-Spielberg was much closer to the mark in Saving Private Ryan-and at least some sense of irony, and would lose the dippy romance, along with the false celebratory, Top Gun-like sheen that appears when Affleck and Hartnett shoot down Zeros over Oahu. For a $145-million movie whose press clippings boast of the accuracy of its costumes, Pearl Harbor is missing a lot. When history is the issue, get it right or leave it alone.