Release Date: May 25, 2001
Starring: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding Jr., Dan Aykroyd, Jon Voight
Directed by: Michael Bay
Written by: Randall Wallace
Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sustained intense war sequences, images of wounded, brief sensuality, some language)
Michael Bay is the king of melodrama, and nowhere is that more evident than in Pearl Harbor. Bay's biggest and most audacious film is a three-hour juggernaut that is all about slick, good-looking visuals and over-inflated dramatic tactics -- in short, the two key elements in the progression from serious drama to melodrama. And although director Bay may have superb command of these elements, in his continual haste to trump himself (each movie he makes is bigger than the last, raising the bar of expectations for the next one), he has lost the ability to temper them into some kind of enjoyable motion picture.
Pearl Harbor may be an enjoyable movie for some. It has all the right components, the ones that sell movie tickets and promote video rentals: a love story (a love triangle, no less), a war story, a friendship story, and not just a boatload of amazing visuals, but an entire fleet's worth. If there is any one aspect of filmmaking that Michael Bay has perfected, it is recognizing these audience favorites and cramming them into a single film.
But cramming is exactly what Bay does in Pearl Harbor. He doesn't blend, he doesn't weave, and he doesn't craft, like so many other filmmakers have done with these same themes. He crams, taking Randall Wallace (Braveheart)'s overlong script and stuffing it into a movie that, despite the best efforts of anyone at Disney, still runs over three hours. Bay's love of doing things over-the-top appears to have reached critical mass in Pearl Harbor, resulting the classic syndrome of keeping almost everything because it seems somewhat relevant. If there is one thing Bay, a former music video director, is not suited to, it's making long movies (his last feature, Armageddon, was similarly bloated at over two and a half hours).
The length of Pearl Harbor, which may turn out to be the chief complaint against it, is never more clearly evident than after the infamous attack scene -- which comes about an hour into the film and lasts forty-five minutes itself. At that point, when most movies would be preparing to roll credits, there is still an entire act and sixty solid minutes to go in Bay's extravagant film.
Fortunately, the money shot -- er, sequence -- is worth the trouble that Bay and Company put into it. The bombing of Pearl Harbor has been recreated in awesome, horrific detail, encompassing not only the ghastly losses suffered by the U.S. Navy but also the whirlwind of chaos afterwards. This is when Bay is at his finest, orchestrating special effects, set pieces, and thousands of extras in finely-tuned unison, and coming up with a replication of history on par with the invasion of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan or the sinking of the title's ocean liner in Titanic.
But this visually arresting second act is surrounded by two hours of character drama, which is most decidedly not Michael Bay's forte. Neither are the history books, either, and for that reason it's to Bay's benefit that he was charged with recreating Pearl Harbor, as opposed to, say, the Clinton impeachment. Bay is really only on top of his game when things are blowing up.
Which should be where screenwriter Randall Wallace comes in. Unfortunately, Wallace, who last penned a rather dark adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask but is most known for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Braveheart, is inexplicably awful here. While he composes a good number of inspiring lines for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (played by Jon Voight), these are largely historically based. The rest of his scenes and lines are good only in the sense that they jive with director Bay's love of melodrama, because even an unbiased observer can recognize the trumped-up hollowness in the words that are spoken in Pearl Harbor. The dialogue and plot are so flimsy that they get swallowed up by Bay's direction -- a good example is a scene near the beginning between pilot buddies Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett). The scene involves a falling-out between the two after Rafe decides to volunteer for the prestigious Eagle Squadron fighting the air war over Europe. A more reserved director, with a better sense of the movie as a whole, might've chosen to play this scene down because it was so early in the movie. But Bay coaxes angry stares and fist-clenching sobs out of his actors, opening the drama valves full-out -- and he's only thirty minutes into the movie, leaving the audience without a clue as to why things are so intense so soon.
It is Rafe's trip to Europe that gets things going in Pearl Harbor. While Rafe is fighting a war that America has not entered, yet, the rest of his friends -- including his best buddy Danny and his beloved Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), ship out to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. (An example of Wallace's too-cute dialogue: "Pearl Harbor is about as far from the war as you can get.") In Rafe's absence, Danny and Evelyn grow closer, and eventually the trouble begins. But none of it compares to the trouble that America will see on December 7 -- when the most devastating surprise attack in history would once again put these three individuals in jeopardy.
The love triangle in Pearl Harbor, which, coupled with a famous disaster at sea, begs comparison to Titanic, is not nearly so inspired. Primarily this is because actors Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck have a touch of Bay's taste for the heavy-handed, turning all of their scenes into gigantic dramatic moments. Especially when viewed in light of Saving Private Ryan, it makes the soldiers portrayed by Affleck and Hartnett as fake and comic-bookish (though that could also be because screenwriter Wallace takes in media res to the extreme -- the audience is given very little background on any of these characters).
Thankfully, Kate Beckinsale is on hand to mop things up -- which isn't easy, given that she's smack in the center of the testosterone vortex caused by Bay, Affleck, and Hartnett. But she does stand out just the same, exhibiting a range of dramatic talent that her male co-stars could only hope to touch, and, as leading women so often do in today's big-budget productions, she injects life and color (and credibility) into the picture.
Which might be worth something if director Bay weren't dead-set on wrecking the movie from the inside. Except for the film's two attack sequences (the main one at Pearl Harbor and the counterattack on Tokyo led by Alec Baldwin's Colonel Doolittle), Bay flip-flops between storylines with the attention span of a kindergartner, pausing only long enough to pump up the drama where it isn't already filled to bursting. To do this, he relies endlessly on slow-motion sequences -- and where another director might employ them to some end, Bay simply uses them as a calling card: "I'm Michael Bay, and this is my movie. It's dramatic." His first of dozens of such sequences comes five minutes into the movie -- when there's no cause or call for drama of any kind.
In the end, though, it's probably to be expected. Michael Bay is one of those in show business who's become very good at giving people what they want, and Pearl Harbor is definitely a crowd-pleaser -- especially because it's a much-awaited summer movie, but also in the year-round capacity because it requires little thought (something that works on both sides of the camera, as the film's numerous anachronisms reveal the amount of effort put into the historical detail). As long as Bay keeps pushing the buttons, he'll keep churning out surefire, albeit very unchallenging, hits like this one.
all contents © 2001 Craig Roush