How the hell do you expect me to sleep in that! I screamed as I opened the cabin door on the Ferry that was to take me on my recent Voyage to Bruges, the whole room resembled a shoe-box and it was obvious that octy wasn’t going to be getting much sleep tonight, in fact I had to find something to do with my time so after walking around the Ferry for an hour I realised there was a cinema on board, woo and indeed hoo I’d get a chance to see a decent movie or so I thought, see whos wise idea was it to play Pearl Harbour in a cinema thats onboard a Ferry floating in the middle of nowhere eh?, but at 11pm that night and £3.50 worse off from the ticket I staggered (well there was a bar on board) into the cinema to watch the movie the critics have panned, and you know what it wasn’t that bad either!
Anybody out there right now wondering what events the whole movie is all about really do need thier heads checking, see back in 1939 we had a little (well gigantic) fight going on all over the world which the americans had decided to stay out of whilst sympathetically offering help to the Allies, I think you might remember it - it was eventually called World War 2, now then we’ve all heard of the Pearl Harbor incident right?, basically Japan forcing the US into the War by bombing one of thier Airbases to smithereens without any warning, this is the incident that this movie is based on.
We start off with scenes of 1940s America, Pilots are being given the chance to volunteer to travel to Europe and help out the Allies in thier fight, Captain Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) is one of the few pilots that take up this offer and has some spare time before he leaves, after catching the eye of Nurse Lieutenent Evelyn Stewart (Kate Beckinsale from here on in known as Nursey Evelyn) we end up seeing the obvious romance of the story start to unfold, its all an obvious addition to the war-story of the plot, but sorry boys we’ve got to keep a female audience so we’ll throw in a romance as well, however McCawley plays the gentlemen and carries on with his duties of leaving for Europe the next day where it is assumed that hes been killed in action after a great action scene in which the audience see his plane crash into the sea (at this point any fears I had about sailing multiplied by ten).
Obviously somebody needs to tell Nursey Evelyn about this and who better than Rafe’s bestest bud in the whole wide world (for now), Captain Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), can you tell what the story is yet?, of course you can - we see love blossom out of the tragedy of Rafes ’death’, however this is a long movie (nearly 3 hours), and we need an early twist, so the creators have come up with this one - Rafes still alive you see, ingenius isn’t it, now we get the emotional conflict of a love triangle set against the back drop of the whole Pearl Harbor incident, don’t worry theres a lot more of the story to go here, but this is all you need to know to give you an idea for what sort of tale you’re letting yourself in for.
Now critics have panned this as being a cross between Titanic and Saving Private Ryan and to a degree they’re right, although it has to be said the love story isn’t as forced as it was in Titanic, and this time rather than it being a struggle between a rogue-ish character and the good guy everyone wants to see get the girl, its just your normal love triangle (well as normal as a love triangle can be), and it does seem to slip into the storyline extremely well, as do the action scenes and the whole story of the actual conflict itself, however word of warning time - if you’re expecting to go and see a factually correct movie about the Pearl Harbor incident, then your expectations will not be met, at the end of the day look who it is who produced the movie - Jerry Bruckheimer - he of Gone in 60 Seconds, The Rock and Coyote Ugly fame, a man whos not known for putting the factual evidence in but more for the big bangs, and thats what he relies on here.
The cast themselves don’t do too bad a job, they are to be honest a list of slowly up and coming stars with names like Cuba Gooding Jr and Ben Affleck these are the type of people you expect to see in movies for years to come and none of them have tarnished thier career by appearing in Pearl Harbor, and a special mention has to go out to 2 cast members - Alec Baldwin (as Lt Colonel Jimmy Doolittle) and Kate Beckinsale for playing Nursey Evelyn as both of these actors have put a lot of work into thier performances and are a credit to the movie, don’t get me wrong this doesn’t make the performances of Messr’s Affleck, Hartnett and Gooding Jr bad performances, its just that these 2 stand out above the rest.
Location and Music score - well these are 2 parts that can make or break a movie as they give the whole feeling of the movie an extra boost and in Pearl Harbor, they make the whole production seem even more realistic, the set-makers have clearly spent a lot of time and money as the scenery and props all look very authentic and could have quite easily been taken from a History museum, and the same can be said for the musical score, its all sounds very similar to the music taken from that era and then we have the movies title track - There you’ll be by Faith Hill, which even without this movie is my favourite song of the moment (only one online person out there knows why and thats the way it’ll stay!!), and even though this track has some modern moments in it and it is a ballad (I like ballads - jeez there goes what little respect I had on this site), it still fits into the movie perfectly.
So then final verdict? its good, nay its very good - it was 3 hours long, finished at 2am and I didn’t fall asleep in the middle of it so it must be doing something right, personally I like this kind of movie though, Action and Romance all rolled into one, its just not that factually correct, so in my opinion this is one time where you have to ignore the critics and give it a go.