PEARL HARBOR review

I headed off to see PEARL HARBOR tonight with a regular audience in a regular theater in little ol Austin, Texas and I thought that I would hate it.

I had spoken with Joe Hallenbeck earlier in the day who has decided to condemn going to see PEARL HARBOR and will go see MEMENTO instead this weekend… Good advice that… MEMENTO should be seen by everybody before they go see PEARL HARBOR… I’ve been preparing myself for not liking PEARL HARBOR… I had whole parts of my review in my head, I remember commenting to Father Geek, "You know what PEARL HARBOR is going to be? It’ll be just like an A-ticket ride at Disneyland. A long line, mild entertainment along the way, then big flashiness, followed by pleasant non-offensive exit stuff, but twice as long."

Frankly, for a film with the ambition that Michael Bay sat out to make, well I expected more. Instead apparently this was Michael Bay’s version of Steven Spielberg’s answer to James Cameron’s TITANIC.

Is that a bad thing?

Yes and no. I enjoyed PEARL HARBOR far more than I was expecting, but it is my least favorite of Bay’s films. Before you go jumping on Bay for that though, you should know that the people that went tonight that are ordinarily Bay-Haters… well the few I talked to came away saying things like, "Well that was pretty good…. For a Michael Bay film!"

However, Robogeek came out of the film with a disgusted look on his face and shock when I said I liked it. Robogeek loved ARMAGEDDON.

I liked PEARL HARBOR with reservations…

I feel the movie is too long. Generally I hate it when people say things like that, because usually it is a flippant remark to mask an inability to finger out a real critique of the film. However, for me, I know what I’d cut… First, I’d cut the entire Cuba Gooding Jr character. I love the character, I like his scenes… I thought he was quite good… But in a film as bloated as this, you have to focus on the story, and for me, this is a story about 3 people. Rafe, Danny and Evelyn. Cuba’s character, while a heroic side story of PEARL HARBOR… it was a heroic side story and felt arbitrarily inserted. Rafe, Danny and Evelyn don’t know this character… He isn’t really a part of their lives… His story doesn’t impact them. His story doesn’t move their story forward. It’s filler, and with a Three Hour Plus movie filler needs to be slimmed. Great DVD material though, the sort that requires a commentary or introduction where you discuss the pains of the editing room… How it felt like cutting a toe off to remove it, but while the side story was great, it didn’t advance the story. Secondly, trying to do a 10-minute study on segregation in the American Military in 1941… well, the topic and the man Cuba Gooding Jr plays deserves his own film… not 10 minutes.

Next, I would cut nearly the entire opening. Beginning the film on the train with the nurses. The entire boyhood flying fantasy sequence makes a great Coke commercial…. Makes for idyllic sweetness… But really, watching the film… Kate Beckinsale’s Evelyn is really the central character that should be telling us the story of Rafe and Danny. Affleck and Hartnett’s character revolve around her…. Their conflict between one another centers around her, and the choices she makes helps to drive the film. I would start with the nurses heading for leave in New York, her story about Rafe being coaxed out of her… and then we meet Ben for the first time at the train station. Everything between Ben and Rafe before that moment is not important to share, because we as an audience should be discovering these characters with Evelyn. All of the ‘early’ stuff between Ben and Josh… It all gets reiterated to Evelyn over the film, so why give the audience that information before… To force our hand… To LABEL the characters easily? We should hear about Rafe leaving for England to fight the Nazis at the front of that hotel, so we could react with Kate, instead of knowing that the scene would be coming because we already knew that he was going to be headed there. It makes the scene redundant and less impactful… in my opinion.

Next… AND MOST IMPORTANT… The film should have ended with the reuniting of Kate and… well you’ll see. Everything that comes after is painfully awful. Literally it is like the worst ending to a good movie in film history. I was aghast to see how the film was ending. It was awkward, amateurish and pathetic. It was literally like following a great meal by a bulimic moment in a stall somewhere. RAAAAALLLLPHHHH…

Minor trimming would include exceptionally cheesy bad moments of Alec Baldwin pontificating about why we’ll win this war… Every American flag shot except for the water one…

Getting tough with the story, this film could have been two and a half hours and a much stronger focused movie.

HOWEVER… as is, I enjoyed the movie. I liked it, but wanted it to be better… to focus on the main characters more. I have no problems with 3 hour plus movies… my problem comes when 30+ minutes of character development is being spent on characters non-integral to the lives of our main characters. The flyboys around Rafe and Danny… and the nurses around Evelyn… They are important to our central characters, but flashing over to various characters giving us a constant update of current events… well that was a major problem with the watchability of TORA TORA TORA, here… Well, I want to see our characters… these new people reacting to what’s happening around them. The friends lost… the shock of being thrust into war. The incredibly awkward position that Danny and Evelyn find themselves in… well that needs to be illuminated better.

Also the Newsreel footage was snipped so short to feel awkward and obtrusive… It felt unnecessary to me.

OK, so gosh is the only thing I liked the EXPLOSIONS?

No, not at all… The original Randall Wallace script was incredibly weak in the ‘romance’ between Rafe and Evelyn and the way that is handled at the opening is Soooooooo much better than what it was. Sure, it is still a brief quickee, but ya know… these were the scenes that my audience reacted absolutely best to. Ben is very charming here and Kate is disarmingly beautiful. Later on, the romance in Hawaii works… well it is flirtatious and awkward and genuinely sweet, albeit corny and contrived, but hey… young love is corny and contrived. Everything about my sister and her husband’s early romance felt like swallowing 3 pounds of powdered sugar… Although the parachute love scene struck me as a bit PENTHOUSE FORUM LETTERISH… But hey, Bay is a visual fetishist and it is beautiful… and the thought about how erotically cool all that parachute silk would feel making love in… Hey… 10 to 1 it would completely rule and be "The most incredible night ever!"

The supporting characters are entertaining and fun and tragic. My favorite being Ewen Bremner aka ‘Red’. I recognized him as being Brad Pitt’s buddy piker in SNATCH, and his stuttering nervous stud character really got to me. He’s been good in the two films I’ve seen him in thus far… Next he’s in BLACKHAWK DOWN, and I’m now looking forward to noticing this actor in his upcoming work.

Mako didn’t have much to work with as Admiral Yamamoto, but I don’t care. Getting to see Mako for just a few minutes on screen makes me smile. I love this actor and he is incredibly underused in modern cinema. MORE MAKO!

Tom Sizemore seems to step into legend with his shotgun in his ‘I don’ give a shit’ moment of defiance, but then… He’s become a professional "I’m not a Sgt. but I’ve played one on TV and Film" sort of guy… and he should continue. He has a great place as a William Bendix in these types of films.

James King…. What a babe! She plays the nurse that Yakko and Wakko are always exclaiming about! Oh my.

Akyroyd and Voight are both dead on in their character portrayals… and Akyroyd makes me wish he did more drama more often, because he’s fantastic if given the opportunity. Voight’s FDR makes me salivate in anticipation of his Howard Cosell in Michael Mann’s ALI this Holiday season. Moriarty seems to like what he’s seen of Voight’s Lord Croft in TOMB RAIDER, but somehow I don’t think it is going to carry the weight of either of these other two roles this year. BUT WHO KNOWS… COULD BE WRONG!

Ultimately I leave PEARL HARBOR a bit sad… I wanted Michael Bay to grow all the way up as a filmmaker. Bay is the biggest rich boy in Hollywood. Some would say Spielberg is, but that’s wrong. Steven grew up somewhere around 1985 or 86. And even before that Spielberg never had the pure immaturity or lack of confidence that is exhibited in Michael’s work.

WAIT A MINUTE! You thought I was a fan of Michael Bay’s?

I am… I am a painfully immature fella myself, but I have minor and transitional periods of inflamed maturity that I take inoculations of coolness to bring down. But Michael loves the BABES, THE TECHNOLOGY, THE STYLES, THE COOL and so on. Why can’t the world be sunrises and sunsets? This is Hollywood, and in Michael’s world time is frozen in the Magic Hour.

What I wanted Michael to do in this film is to pull back and look at the film for the sake of NARRATIVE FILMMAKING instead of Cinema of Cool. I wanted Michael to make the hard decisions in the editing room that would have or could have made this movie a more mature film. Of course the problem is Jerry Bruckheimer is a kid too. So he doesn’t have a producer or a partner that can step back and say… Ya know what Michael, greatness is in this movie… but throwing it all up on the screen hoping that the audience and the viewers and the critics will find the greatness for themselves… Well it’s a bit lazy.

This movie has greatness in it. In 1941-42 America was a naïve world staying out of the scraps. It was a time where the youth felt that nothing could touch them, that the moment was lasting and staying forever. THEN Pearl Harbor happened and the United States collectively grew the grey hairs that next morning. The moment could be destroyed. Lives crushed and innocence taken. The key moment in the film features Danny and Rafe in that beautiful Oldsmobile (I believe) and Rafe says something along the lines of, "Danny, I just don’t know how anything could ever be the same with us," and then the next morning… Petty differences even serious differences no longer mattered. Hell came to paradise and staying alive and trying to keep others alive washed over all of that.

This was a time when people believed on inspiring others by taking impossible missions… and dying. The love story… I could almost hear Bogart saying, "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that." Well, that’s what a worldly, wise, eroded-by-life man would say given the same situation these kids find themselves in, but dammit… Josh Hartnett’s character is just a kid… Kate Beckinsale is too. Ben Affleck’s a bit older, but not at heart. We older, wiser, more experienced people… well we look at them and want them be Bogart… We’d be Bogart… We judge the love triangle by CASABLANCA, but there’s a difference. They had Paris, these kids have New York and Honolulu. They had long leisurely love, not puppy love, but adult love, these kids are falling for the first time and this happens. This is crazy desperate love, the type you believe you have once in a lifetime because you’ve never had it before and you think you can never have second helpings. This is the innocence of pre-WWII United States. It’s corny and cheesy, but ya know… Young love is.

I don’t LOVE or HATE Pearl Harbor…. I like it. I like it and wish it to be better than it is, because inside this film… a few slight layers from what we see in the theaters is a greater film. But Bay missed the tree for the forest. His sights were too wide, focusing on trying to give us more than we needed… believing that more is better… when in reality, enough is enough.