Pearl Harbor is an indescribably bad motion picture that is some kind of weird shambling hybrid of Independence Day, From Here To Eternity, and, saints preserve us, Titanic. It never would have seen the light of day, but for our collective and indefatigable appetite for barely literate nonsense so long as that nonsense takes on the cause of some dimly remembered, chest-pounding moment in Western history. The great tragedy of Disney’s Pearl Harbor is not that it’s relentlessly unwatchable, a half-masticated and regurgitated mess of pop cultural touchstones from Rockwell and Hopper to Star Wars and “The Three Stooges, ” but that it takes the deaths of over two thousand United States servicemen and turns it into some kind of brief interlude in a hackneyed love triangle.
Flyboy A (Ben Affleck: Bounce) loves Nurse A (Kate Beckinsdale). Flyboy A is best buddies with Flyboy B (Josh Hartnett: The Faculty). Flyboy A appears to be killed. Flyboy B knocks up Nurse A in his absence. Flyboy A reappears about three months later and is unjustifiably peeved. The oft-referred to “Jap Suckers” bomb the holy hell out of Pearl Harbor and many deeply uninteresting secondary romantic subplots are handily disentangled by sudden PG-13 death.
Flyboy A and Flyboy B have their differences resolved for them about forty-minutes later in a highly manufactured moment of shockingly false religiosity and convenience. There is a cameo by handsome over-actor Alec Baldwin.
Fade to black with crude and misleading voice-over.
Defenders of this film will get into how the history is inaccurate, and so what? Go to this movie for the feeling of patriotism, they will exult, and not to (shudder) learn. Respecting their wishes, rather than take too close a look at the myriad offenses of the endlessly offensive Pearl Harbor, let’s delve a little bit into the kind of culture that would first sanction the stillbirth of such a mess and then dutifully flock to its fetid corpse in droves. If films are litmus tests for the zeitgeist of an era, then what does the first major blockbuster of the new millennium say about the decade that’s just ended? What is the pulse of our nation? The “don’t worry about truth” apologists demand such a reading just as a child who draws a disturbed family portrait with his over-sized crayolas knows not what he does while saying more than he suspects.
This movie isn’t history, of course, computer-animated Zeroes dropping computer-animated bombs on computer-animated ships in a virtually-scrubbed Pearl Harbor is not history. This movie, and every movie, is a reflection of society – what we want in our entertainments as expressed by our spending choices over the last decade or so. If you want the history of Pearl Harbor, read At Dawn We Slept.
According to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor we are victims. A nation of the grossly undereducated (Flyboy A’s great charm is that he’s illiterate. “I ain’t never gone be no English teacher, but can I FLY! WHOOOEEE!”), venemously anti-intellectual, over-medicated, aggressively ignorant, helplessly naïve, and hopelessly romantic; mooning around in circular Byronic maunders about lost virtues and the evils of a mysterious and alien world that seeks to do our bountiful bucolic Rockwellian wonderland harm. Still, we are not helpless in our Eden. As Admiral Yamamato (a historical figure deserving of a film all his own and receiving no less than five) mutters in the film’s only intelligent line (which was, after all, taken from history): the United States is a sleeping giant, a nation of people desperately in need of a stiff boot to the pants to knock us out of our depression and resuscitate our self-esteem. Why is everyone picking on the United States when all we want is to lay leggy women, drink malteds at the soda shop, and reenact select scenes from The Great Waldo Pepper?
When Cuba Gooding, Jr. (who appears to again be playing Carl Brashear from the equally crappy Men of Honor), tearfully fishes a bullet-riddled and oil-stained Old Glory from the turbid waters of the unquiet Harbor (when he should be, I dunno’, saving drowning sailors) and cuddles it like a wet nurse with a particularly soiled charge, Pearl Harbor as much as states our collective confusion with the curiously self-actualized nineties; and our communal need for a hug from a white-upper-middle class fantasy of a non-threatening minority.
According to Pearl Harbor, we demand that our new entertainments resemble all of our favorites from the past. It’s telling that the top selling albums of the land are compilation CD’s that periodically collect chart-toppers – we no longer have the patience to dig out the wheat from the chaff, we leave the winnowing to commerce-minded idiots who dictate our tastes.
You see, Pearl Harbor is an amalgam, a collage, a media project from an enterprising liberal arts undergraduate who has collected all of the pabulum of the last thirty years of popular entertainment and presented it to us in a greatest hits compilation, without all that irritating plot and character development that might stimulate thought or, perish the thought, provoke an active viewership. Nothing is a surprise in the film and, unlike From Here to Eternity, there is no tension in the inevitability of that glowing December 7th date that does, indeed, live in infamy. Why no tension? Because it’s absolutely impossible to care about fictional characters who say things like this:
RAFE (after he’s hit his nose with a cork): You are so beautiful it hurts.
EVELYN (a.k.a. “Nurse A”): It is your nose that hurts!
RAFE: I think that it is my heart!
Uh huh. If you have an hour, I’ll tell you what hurts on me.
I ardently hope that the sanitized (and, in places, vaseline prettified) for mid-teen consumption ambush sequence only unintentionally inspires ’’Oh, cool’’ responses in Michael Bay’s irresponsible glee for the slickly incomprehensible action sequence. The last thing we should be feeling when the Arizona’s hull buckles before going down with all hands is a summer blockbuster ’’AWESOME!’’ What’s lost in the clamor to praise this setpiece from Pearl Harbor is the gravity of what we are witnessing which is trod upon and utterly lost in the translation to big-budget ’’event’’ picture.
The score is a stuttering stepchild of Carl Orff choral mumsing and Aaron Coupland patriotic jackbooting with all the suck such a union implies, and there is so much time spent about an inch from Ben Affleck’s face that you come to the stunning realization that his head is, in fact, a perfect cube.
If given their druthers, I wonder if ’’The Greatest Generation’’ would choose to be memorialized in a Ritalin-starved husk of CGI festooned with poorer than poor dialogue, manufactured schmaltz, a conspicuous lightness of purpose and punch, and not even the decency to worry about such inconsequential things as, say, continuity.
My guess is ’’no.’’
It’s amazing how little $140 million dollars is buying these days, isn’t it?