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History lessens
War is sell in Pearl Harbor

BY PETER KEOUGH



Bomb Bay

WAIKIKI - Director Michael Bay, who with producer Jerry Bruckheimer has made about a billion dollars with Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon, doesn't have much use for film critics. But he seems to get along okay with the US Navy, if the setting of the press junket for Pearl Harbor is any indication.

We are in the vast hangar deck of the USS John C. Stennis, a 1097-foot-long aircraft carrier that's usually filled with squadrons of F-14s and F-18s but now is hosting roundtable interviews with the cast and crew of the three-hour epic re-creating the December 7, 1941, attack that pushed America into World War II. On the flight deck above a giant screen awaits the film's $5 million world premiere. Outside are the waters of Pearl Harbor itself, resting place for the battleship Arizona, which sank in a tremendous explosion that took more than 1200 lives; it's now a national memorial visited by a million people every year, and the subject of one of the $135 million film's most spectacular special effects.

Bay believes he's served Pearl Harbor's memory well. "I've met now with probably 130, 140 survivors. That's the thing that really changed me. They told some very intimate, graphic stories. That was two years ago, when we were working on the script. I hope we got the essence of what happened at Pearl Harbor, the essence of the generation. There's a great line from Doolittle where he says, 'There's nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.' It's kind of the essence of the movie."

But when audiences see these people getting killed in these spectacular ways, aren't they going to think, "Cool"? "That would be the wrong attitude to take to the movie," Bay insists. "These survivors talk about the Arizona leaping nine feet out of the water. We're not showing stuff that didn't happen. Guys got strafed in the water. There were two pilots who got up during the attack and shot down six Zeroes. So we wove that into the story. The details are what make the movie interesting."

The love triangle involving Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale that is the focus of the film is, of course, completely fictitious. Bay points to the failure of the 1970 Pearl Harbor film Tora! Tora! Tora! as justification for this poetic license. "I've seen Tora! twice, and I felt that in it you weren't seeing the attack personally, you were seeing it standoffishly, from an officer's level. It was very kind of docudrama, and you didn't feel you were seeing it through someone's eyes that you cared about. There's no love story, but you have to see your story through someone's eyes. That's the key to any great story."

Another key to the success of Pearl Harbor, he argues, is renewed interest in war films and renewed respect for those who went to war. "It's the Great Generation. When you meet these people, there's a different innocence about them, there's a true conviction about the country. There's not this cynicism you see nowadays. That's what I get when I talk to these men and women. Their country was first, and they'd give their life at the drop of their hat for their country. And I think Pearl Harbor hasn't really been shown in a movie because of the technology until now."

- PK

“That’s bullshit,” says Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) in the early going of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor after hotdogging flight trainee Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck, smart-ass and insipid) excuses his latest aerial stunt by calling it a “homage.” “But,” he adds, “it’s very good bullshit.” The film, on the other hand, as homage or as entertainment, is just bullshit. It fails on every level. As a re-creation of a historical tragedy, it’s the world’s biggest video game. As a tribute to those who endured it, it’s a hypocritical, exploitive travesty. As a love story unfolding in the midst of an epic event, it makes Titanic look, well, titanic. Maybe as a moneymaking product it can succeed, but only for the first weekend, until people figure out what a dud it is.

That should happen about 10 minutes into its three-hour length, as Bay delays getting to the Japanese sneak attack to provide a back story for the fictitious ciphers who save the day. As kids, Rafe and best friend Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett, brooding and inept) both dreamed of flying fighter planes, and they take off briefly in Rafe’s father’s cropduster. Danny’s dad gives his boy a licking, but Rafe is there to defend his pal. Turns out Danny’s dad is messed up because of World War I. So Rafe’s the protective alpha male, Danny’s the wounded Montgomery Clift type, and whether war is hell or just a game, they will be friends forever and their dialogue will always be bad (thanks to screenwriter Randall Wallace, Oscar winner for Braveheart).

Years pass, they’re in the Army Air Corps, and the rest of the world’s at war. Rafe falls in love with Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale, aiming for Katharine Hepburn or Veronica Lake but settling for Jessica Rabbit), a nurse who jabs him twice in the butt with a big hypo in a sequence that is most painful in its grueling attempt at humor. But Rafe wants to volunteer to fight the Luftwaffe. “I’m not eager to die,” he says in one of the film’s few decent lines. “I’m eager to matter.” But you know it’s Bay who’s eager to get to the aerial combat. Neither passion nor psychology motivates behavior here; they serve only as an excuse to insert neat effects and justify them with platitudes.

Worse luck for Rafe, who gets shot down over the Channel and is presumed lost (such suspense: how will Ben Affleck achieve his return from the dead?). Danny and Evelyn in the meantime have been assigned to Hawaii, and what with a sunrise flight in a P-40 and a walk through a hangar full of parachutes shot by a revolving camera — well, these things happen. Then, who should pop up at the worst moment?

As Humphrey Bogart put it, all this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Just in case you had forgotten the title of the movie, Bay interjects the occasional newsreel footage, or scenes of Dan Aykroyd as an intelligence officer trying to figure out where the Imperial fleet is, or of Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) plotting his pre-emptive strike (the Japanese are noble stereotypes, with nice uniforms and subtitled dialogue). And, sad to say, you can’t wait for the bombs to fall, if only to put an end to these irritating characters and a trite triangle so lacking in chemistry that it doesn’t even sustain a gay subtext. The supporting cast, lunkheads with names like Red and Gooz, are just a charmless collection of tics and clichés. Only Jon Voight as FDR salvages anything from the wreckage; who else could pull off the scene in which the polio-stricken president rises from his wheelchair to make a point without arousing laughter? Maybe he should get a nod for best unsupported actor.

As for the attack itself, watch the trailer. Bay, forged by commercials and MTV, is a master of the 60-second format. Unlike Spielberg, who structured the opening of Saving Private Ryan into a three-act drama that propelled the horrific detailing, Bay gives us a collection of sound and visual bites that evokes the chaos not of war but of a video arcade. True, there are moments of pathos and glory: Cuba Gooding Jr. as the black messmate who grabs a gun and fires back evokes the sense of helplessness and fury; Beckinsale in triage reassuring a wounded kid even as she marks him off as a fatal case. Mostly, though, it’s a barrage of explosions (the destruction of the Arizona shot from the point of view of the dropping bomb recalls the technological detachment of the Gulf War) and “homages.” Ripoffs of Private Ryan, Titanic, and Star Wars are blatant, the last being most egregiously evoked when Rafe and Danny hop into their fighters and take on the entire Japanese air force.

In fact, there were a couple of pilots who did that, shooting down some half-dozen enemy planes between them. But it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that by turning their heroism into a thrill ride, by attributing it to a callow Rambo who has just come from winning the Battle of Britain and will go on to fly with Doolittle to bomb Tokyo (sorry, folks, when the smoke clears at Pearl, there’s still a long way to go), the movie trivializes it. “Nothing,” says Doolittle, “is stronger than the heart of a volunteer.” Except maybe the cynicism of a Hollywood filmmaker.

Issue Date: May 24-31, 2001





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