Pearl Harbor is an indescribably bad motion picture that is some kind of weird shambling mutant 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 craving for barely literate nonsense so long as that nonsense takes on the cause of some dimly remembered, chest-pounding moment in Western history (like the Revolutionary War), or has a suitable number of explosions, or both. 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 three thousand United States servicemen and turns it into some kind of brief interlude in a hackneyed love triangle intrigue.

the low down

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.

spirit of an age

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, in other words, 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, yet says 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.

When the Jap Suckers fly in very early on that fateful day (startling 4 youngsters playing, 3 nurses napping, 2 boy scouts whizzing, 1 laaaaaaundry maid), Michael Bay presents, in addition to these treacly images of sepia-tinged Rockwell Americana, a couple of little girls in white dresses and angel wings (?), a cardboard standup Santa Claus, a rustic church and steeple, and a sleepy Hopper-esque small town as imagined by Maxfield Parrish. So intent is the film on presenting to me the Thornton Wilder perfection of Hawaii circa 1942 that I was mildly shocked that the Jap Suckers didn’t strafe a rosy-cheeked grandma putting a bird-footed apple pie on her window sill.

According to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, then, 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, wholly ignorant, helplessly naďve, and hopelessly romantic; mooning around in circular Byronic maunders about lost virtues and the evils of a mysterious and alien world that seek to do our bountiful bucolic wonderland harm. Still, we are not helpless in our Eden. As Admiral Yamamato (a historical figure deserving of a film all his own) 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.

compilation hits

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.

Speaking of From Here to Eternity, there’s an updated cheescake/beefcake smooch on a beach, a portentous flipping of a calendar (on the Japanese command vessel, which is odd for so many reasons), and a boxing match (though played this time for black pride, or something). The actual attack (which is pretty decent in a shrug kind of way and lasts for about forty minutes after an hour-and-a-half of dangerously unleavened crap), is almost exactly like the penultimate battle in Independence Day - occurring at the same juncture in the film (and surrounded by the same amount of pure crap), while the swarm of "Jap Sucker" aircraft is not only like the alien pods of ID4, but the “highly maneuverable” TIE fighters of Darth’s imperial navy.

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.

From Star Trek and Chicken Run we get a Scottish engineer (“Wuher gibben it awl shees got, keptin!”), from planet “duh” we get Tom Sizemore as a (duh) grizzled old vet, from every James Cameron movie we get the overuse of the extreme low angle “God” shot, and from music videos we get unmotivated extreme close-ups, dizzying and confused editing, and a gratuitous abuse of the slow motion moment of manufactured grandeur.

So shameless is this flick that there’s a dog in peril that does not die. . . four of them, actually, in separate scenes, alternately pushing balls with their adorable muzzles or sticking close to their bullet-ridden masters. There is the confused symbol of love from Titanic (the heart of the ocean, and sunsets, respectively), along with the tilting sinking ships and the satisfying head-striking-exposed-prop-BONG, and, of course, the stultifying dialogue (“I’m not anxious to die – just anxious. . . to matter!” “It’s cold. So cold it goes deep into yer bones!”).

It's actually easier just to say that Pearl Harbor is a louder version of Titanic.

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.

enough already

So, then, enough already. British actress Kate Beckinsdale is a very pretty cross between Audrey Hepburn and Nicole Kidman, but less hysterical than Hepburn and not quite as frigid and off-putting as Kidman. She is asked simply to be a nurse in a war movie: love interest, lonely heart, briefly valorous, dutifully wifely – she is not, in other words, asked to do much, but she does it all with a very convincing Yankee accent. Good for her, she can be Bizarro Gwyneth Paltrow (who, in a rare moment of wisdom, incidentally, turned down the role). Ben Affleck is. . . urm, limited (did I mention the cube thing? creepy), and Josh Hartnett is better, but probably only by comparison. Both are ridiculous as country-fried southern cornpone, neither aided by a flashback intro in which two child versions of the bad actors scream out – “Land of the free!” and “ Home of the brave!” like mantric Catholic goads and responses.

Julien Donkey-Boy plays stuttering comic relief (vocal afflictions are always funny, aren’t they?), and some tartlet in a sundress plays a tartlet in a sundress who loves the stutterer in a doomed Esmerelda/Quasimodo subplot. Alec Baldwin bookends the piece as Colonel Doolittle (played better, of course, by Spencer Tracy in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo a film that has a suspiciously similar storyline...), appears periodically to play the balls-busting captain from a police drama, and to deliver his speech from Glengarry Glen Ross again almost word-for-word (except no free car) before delivering the most awkward monologue in a film filthy with English-as-a-second-language dialogue. John Voight appears as some kind of inspirationally crippled cyborg who whips out of his space-age ambulatron (without the aid of his Negro manservant), to deliver a stirring speech about courage and possibilities and Cuba Gooding, Jr. is, again, Denzel Washington-lite. Looking forward to Cuba in the George Washington Carver story, coming this fall to HBO. Kidding.

Let me leave you with this observation – that for as uniformly poor or familiar as every aspect of Pearl Harbor is, the greatest mysteries of its disjointed inadequacy are summarized neatly by two scenes.

1. When Rafe is shot down during the Battle of Britain (this is how Flyboy A appears to have died), he splashes down in broad daylight and struggles heroically to wriggle out of the cockpit for what appears to be several hours for when our beloved Flyboy surfaces, he surfaces in the dead of night.

2. Later, back in Hawaii, Rafe removes his shirt and puts on a different one in roughly .002 of a second (editing mistake. . . in my favor!).

This is what I think. I think that Rafe is one of those Waterworld fishmen, which is why he talks like Kevin Costner and why he has a perfect cube resting on his slight shoulders. This is why he can escape a crashed airplane with no ill-effects from the crash, stay underwater near his ship (for safety and shade) until nightfall without respiration (as we know it), and how his lightning-fast mutie reflexes enable him to wrestle a decrepit dump truck of an fighter into a successful dogfight with a fleet of clearly superior aircraft.

With fishmen aviators like Rafe, how could we lose?

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?







Recommended:
No