Pearl Harbor

It's not like I want my money back or anything, but I won't see it a second time. My review, from my board:

SUMMARY

An ace pilot (Ben Affleck) and his best friend since childhood (Josh Hartnett) both fall for an army nurse (Kate Beckinsdale). Oh, and there are these big boats, you see, and...


RECOMMENDED FOR:

FX nuts with a lot of patience for unoriginal love triangle stories.


REVIEW

If only Pearl Harbor was actually about Pearl Harbor.

Instead, it revolves around an unoriginal rehash of a love triangle involving two best friends and a girl. Nobody cares, because a) the girl is a ditz, and b) the two best friends in question seem to be capable of doing only two things: aerial combat and Point A.

Where the film excels is in the arena of being a spectacle of light and sound, and exactly the sort of movie I might buy on DVD one day for a discount price so I can use it to demo my home theatre system (a task in which Saving Private Ryan already suffices). The big question is why it didn't emphasize what it's good at, and what director Michael Bay is good at: blowing things up.

The big answer is that Pearl Harbor simply tries too hard to go beyond the historical aspect and introduce a stock love story aspect. In fact, it pushes the love story so hard that the actual devastation of Pearl Harbor is only the second act of a three-act drama. It is possible to have an optimistic perspective on similar films such as Titanic, and say that maybe the film really was about the ship and the love story is a subplot, but Pearl Harbor leaves no room for any doubt that the love story is the story. The movie is probably titled Pearl Harbor not because of the attack there, but because the romantic plot takes shape primarily in Hawaii. Those clever marketeers, what will they think of next?

The love story might even have worked if it actually had some relevance underneath the war instead of attempting to transcend it. If only it was realized that "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." (Didn't anyone learn anything from Casablanca?)

Disregarding this major and expected lapse in judgment on the part of the filmmakers, as a production, Pearl Harbor is spectacular. The effects work is beautiful, and the overall visual impact is impressive. The colour balance is particularly notable, and can be used as a convincing argument for shooting more historical films in Technicolor. The actual attack on Pearl Harbor is by far and wide the highlight of the film, and actually seems rather short as a result of this. The sound work is tremendous, and in that respect this is the year's movie to beat.

Hans Zimmer's score was not a total ripoff of another film (i.e. James Horner's music for Enemy At The Gates) but is a testament to the degrading trend of using unmelodious string chorales in World War II films, of which the only one worth mentioning is John Williams' Saving Private Ryan score, which wasn't exactly one of the high points of his career either. Zimmer also lifts a few chord progressions and the occasional thumping timpani out of Gladiator, but is apparently too lazy to come up with something memorably thematic for Pearl Harbor. Let's wake up and smell the coffee: big historical films need big scores if they want to be remembered. Pearl Harbor's score is decent and workable, just not terribly memorable. For this reason, among others, the film itself will not be terribly memorable either.

Randall Wallace's screenplay did not have the banality of Titanic, nor the memorability of Wallace's other script of Braveheart - the dialogue is simply average. However, it tilted into the realm of banality with regards to how Franklin Roosevelt is written. Are we meant to think that even in plain conversation, the guy talked like he was doing a speech on national radio? Jon Voight's lackluster acting certainly didn't help much, either.

And what's with the seemingly intentional lack of grammatical correctness in the English subtitles of the dialogue of the Japanese characters?

All in all, Pearl Harbor is a very average movie, but one that offers the best visual spectacle of the year so far.