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Pearl Harbor (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) |
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Before I tell you about this film, I think it's important to establish the levels of "bad", and the way people use this word when referring to films. A lot of people say Titanic is a "bad" movie, but that isn't really a position they can defend. They can argue that it trivializes tragedy, that it is corny, that it changes history for a convenient story, and there is truth in all of that. They can argue that they don't like it, and there is no disputing that many people hate it. But Titanic is some kick-ass filmmaking. It is a powerful love story. It is a historical spectacle. It is true to history in spirit, if not in every tiny detail. If you say that you don't like movies like Titanic, fine, I agree with you in many ways. Titanic and other similar films do have a special shallow quality that only overblown spectacle can attain. But it sure ain't a "bad" movie. It has great set design and costumes, magnificent use and interweaving of miniatures and sets, grander-then-life romance, Perils of Pauline tension, solid acting, and enough historical accuracy to give the right impression of the era. Historical spectacles, when they are done well, have some powerful emotional and educational appeal across a broad spectrum of viewers, excluding only the intellectuals who carp at everything which doesn't involve a hand-held camera and junkies dying of cancer. I can watch good spectacles. Sometimes I even enjoy them. I love Lawrence of Arabia, for example, and I like Titanic, except for the annoying music. Before I saw Pearl Harbor, I prepared myself for another Titanic. I figured it would be an entertaining picture in many ways, with the foregone expectation that an historical tragedy would be trivialized with a sappy love story. Having given you that preface, I must now regretfully report that Pearl Harbor is not in the same class as those films. If you are thinking Titanic, think again. For a comparable spectacle you need to look to the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra. Pearl Harbor is not merely a trivialization of tragedy, but is, in fact, a terrible movie in nearly every way. The story is non-existent. The film is jingoistic. Except for FDR's actual words, the dialogue doesn't sound like any words ever spoken by human beings in the 1940's, and includes such familiar goodies as: I'll never look at another sunset without thinking of you. You remind me of myself at your age. It is more unbalanced than those corny WW2 movies actually made in WW2. The Japanese are wooden, unsmiling and satanic. The Americans are all golly-gee wholesome and honorable. The script seems to be written for people who have never heard of World War Two, possibly by someone who only recently discovered it himself. "Whoa - honey, did you know we were at war with the Japanese and the Germans not too long ago. Whoa! I gotta write me a movie about that. That's hot! I see Ben Affleck as the gallant aviator fighting the Taliban, or whatever those guys were called back then." |
| The film has every war movie cliché in the book, including the dreaded resurrection. The acting is generally poor, and the characterizations lifeless, except for Jon Voight, who was surprisingly good as FDR. The second-best characterization in the film was probably given by Alec Baldwin. Think about that. How good can a three-hour epic be if the second most memorable performance is delivered by a guy with about ten lines. Kinda scary, when you think about it. Beautiful Kate Beckinsale, who is an adult and was supposed to be playing an adult, delivers virtually every line in the official artificial sensitive tone adopted by 14 year old girls reading their own poetry books. |
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In addition to all the
other problems, the film has a corny gratuitous voice-over epilogue,
and a prologue which is not only bad, but may be the most
incomprehensibly bad five minutes of film I have ever seen. If it were
inserted into the middle of Barn of the Naked Dead, you would not
notice that it was out of place. Here's a quick capsule summary:
If any of you understand how any parts of that could follow logically from the earlier parts, you should be working for Jerry Bruckheimer, and should contact him. That was the intro to the movie. And it went downhill from there. To be fair, the aviation scenes and some of the war footage were pretty solid on the spectacle scale, but I am not one to find much entertainment value in slaughter, and whenever they got the characters talking again, it reverted right back to gibberish. Worse still, it reverted to 90's gibberish, not 40's gibberish. I heard "you da man" once, and "could she BE any more boring". |
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I'm tired of talking about this film. It doesn't even deserve to be made fun of. My humor is all based on exaggeration, but with this film, as with Plan 9 from Outer Space, it is not really possible to exaggerate. Every lie that I would have told is already in the script, unless I want to claim that it located WW2 in New Zealand in 1967, which it probably did in the first draft. To the eternal credit of the filmmakers, the 2-disk DVD contains virtually nothing about the film itself. There are various documentaries about what really happened in the beginning of December, 1941, all of which is far more affecting than the movie. |
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