Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I just want to start by saying to Alexandra DuPont that the wedding’s off, and I want my promise ring back.
”It gets the job done.” – Mick LaSalle, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
I’ve spent the last couple of hours sifting through the debris left in the wake of Michael Bay’s behemoth, and it ain’t pretty. A lot of people behaved miserably, a lot of money was wasted, and more words have been spent than seem possible for what is ultimately a disappointing action film of exceedingly average pedigree.
That’s right. Not an abomination. Not the end of cinema as we know it. And certainly not the worst film of all time. Or even of this year so far. Hell... it might not even be the worst big-budget film this month. I didn’t see DRIVEN, though, so I’m just guessing...
PEARL HARBOR works too hard. It’s a film that wants to paint a picture of a romantic triangle that is genuinely wrenching. It’s a film that wants to show us the horrors of war even as it revels in the thrill of real heroism. It’s a film that wants to say something about the loss of American innocence. It’s a film that wants to be grown-up and smart even as it’s nakedly sentimental and, yes, juvenile.
And in the end, it’s a film that pleases none of its audiences fully, that ultimately satisfies none of its wants. I have yet to read one review that says, “The whole thing works perfectly, scene for scene, and everything gels.” Oh, I’ve read people review the bits and pieces, pulling it apart in an effort to find what they like.
”This is probably the most brilliantly assembled and highly adrenalized action sequence in movie history.” – Jeffrey Wells, REEL.com
Dear sweet god, deliver me from this landscape of lowered expectations. Is this really what we’ve come to? We are now reviewing films on a sequence by sequence basis, giving them passing grades as long as there’s just a run of stuff we like, even if we have to sit through three hours of genuinely dull drama, poorly written and poorly acted for the most part, to get to it?
I blame JURASSIC PARK. When that film came out, there was no denying the first T-Rex sequence, as well as a handful of other scenes scattered throughout the film. I know what I went back to see six times in a theater. It was that 20 minutes or so, in the rain, parked there next to the T-Rex paddock, and it was that genuine adrenal rush that seemed to happen each time I saw it in ear-shattering DTS. I remember the temperature change in the theater those first two weeks, the way people would hold their breath, scared out of their wits. That was a summer movie, but for that one stretch of time, it was more. It was primal. It was a seamless illusion, virtual reality, and it was amazing. That one scene propelled the film to its monstrous box-office, I believe, and sent the clear message to the rest of the industry: nothing else matters but the money shot.
”Whatever else you can say about PEARL HARBOR, when it comes to the money sequence—the Japanese bombs wreaking havoc on the U.S. fleet that fateful morning—Michael Bay’s epic delivers. Ninety minutes into this massive movie the attack commences, and the spectacular images come hurtling like fireballs. This is, let’s be honest, what we’re here for, and what most Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movies serve up best: the poetry of destruction. Fighter planes swoop between buildings like something out of STAR WARS. A battleship flips sideways in the Hawaiian harbor, the crew clutching to the edge like something out of TITANIC. Drowning soldiers are shot underwater, enemy bullets strafing the ocean like something out of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.” – David Ansen, NEWSWEEK
Here’s the thing about this action sequence that’s got everyone so hot and bothered: it’s boring.
A great action sequence is equal parts geography and energy. Michael Bay can orchestrate energy, no doubt about it. I am impressed by the sheer physical size of what he’s created, and I certainly can’t imagine being responsible for a spectacle of this size. But five minutes in, I felt myself going numb to the repetitive nature of the images. I found myself thinking, “How many times are they going to fly those two airplanes between those two ships?” I found myself guessing what was CG and what was real. I found myself wondering how long the sequence was actually going to run. I found myself thinking a dozen different things, none of which had anything to do with the events onscreen. Because so little of it was clearly laid out, none of it ended up making an impact.
Wait... I take that back. There was one set of images in the midst of all of it that actually stirred something like sympathy from my black, tiny, Grinch heart. When Betty (James King) was running towards the hospital and the Zeros came in behind her, strafing the pavement with gunfire, there was a moment, some fleeting combination of shots, that made me feel tiny stirrings of empathy, maybe even the faintest echo of horror.
The genius of the opening of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (another Spielberg film where the parts are greater than the whole) was the way it forced us right into the center of that assault on the beach, the way it put it right in our face, up our nose, down our throats. There was no way to shut out the sheer volume of horror, and instead of going numb in the sense that we don’t care about what we’re seeing, we are forced into a total visceral reaction. RYAN is effective in those opening moments because we have no choice but to feel what we’re watching.
Bay fails to connect the events we’re watching with any sort of emotion. We certainly aren’t plunged into the events as participants. Instead, we’re shown images that have all the emotional resonance of a video game cut scene. If this were a SF film like INDEPENDENCE DAY (the closest predecessor to this film I can think of), I wouldn’t complain quite so much about the lack of emotional investment in these scenes.
This is Pearl Harbor, though. This happened. This is something that still matters to many people who are alive. And I think this reduces a tragic, horrible morning to something that’s only degrees away from the WATERWORLD Stunt Spectacular at Universal Studios.
“The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.” – A.O. Scott, THE NEW YORK TIMES
I’ll say this about the critics this weekend: they were funny. Many of them seem to have been drafting their reviews for months, with more gags per column inch than a year of Dave Barry. But in their rush to be glib and to destroy Michael Bay’s big dumb Lenny of a movie (“If I had an audience, George, I’d love them and hug them and feed them every day, yes, I would.”), they have also been cruel and overstated.
I’m no fan of Bay’s. I’ve made that perfectly clear in my conversations with Harry over the years, in my writing here on the page, and even when I visited Bay Films twice during production on this picture. It is possible to not be a fan of someone’s work without being a total cock, though, something that seems to have escaped many of the critics who shredded the film, like the much ballyhooed Ray Pride, who broke the press embargo date in his rush to get in his early shots on the film. He attacks Affleck for the excessive spit that seems to gather in the corners of his mouth.
This is film criticism? We’re reduced to making fun of an actor because of some spit?
Who does a review like that serve? The average moviegoing consumer who’s looking for a CONSUMER REPORTS-like summary of the movie with a simple number score? The discerning cineaste who wouldn’t be caught dead in the theater anyway? Or is it just a point of pride (pun intended)? Is it just a chance to flex your sarcasm muscle for the amusement of yourself and a handful of other entertainment writers?
On the other hand, I’d like to reserve a bit of scorn and contempt for the writers who went to the PEARL HARBOR junket in Hawaii last week and wrote about the premiere without even the slightest sense of context. In particular, it was the coverage by Garth Franklin, the damn fine fellow who runs Dark Horizons, and by Jeff Wells of Reel.com that made me wonder where Hunter S. Thompson is when you need him.
Reading the description of the event that took place less than 1200 feet from the place where the USS ARIZONA still lies, its crew still entombed within, I could help but feel a flash of genuine anger. I guess it’s nothing compared to that incredible SAVING PRIVATE RYAN premiere that Spielberg threw on the beach at Normandy, or that incredible party he had Wolfgang Puck cater at Auschwitz when SCHINDLER’S LIST opened.
Oh, wait... that’s right. Neither of those things happened. Because Spielberg had the proper respect for the weight of what he was making films about. These are sacred places now, places where enormous loss of life has consecrated the grounds, where one should offer personal respects to the people who lost their lives under such horrific circumstances. These are not places you go to throw a fireworks display.
Howard Rosenberg came the closest to a sane response with his incredulous piece about “a junket that will live in infamy” in THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:
“Give Disney credit for knowing what turns on these media suckers and suck-ups, whose snap-tos and crisp salutes to Hollywood made this cosmic stunt possible. Disney made them sob by wrapping PEARL HARBOR in Old Glory. It brought in Faith Hill to belt out the National Anthem. It had Navy SEALs parachute from a Black Hawk helicopter. It had F-15 fighters fly above the carrier in a "missing man" formation. It paraded before teary media eyes, radio mikes and TV lenses aged survivors of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack that killed more than 2,400 Americans and drew the U.S. into World War II. Disney didn't stop there. It set off 20 minutes of massive fireworks. It displayed a vintage B-25 bomber and a P-40 fighter. It put out white party tents and brought in the Honolulu Symphony Pops Orchestra. It rolled out co-stars Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale like red carpets, and delivered them, along with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Michael Bay and the invited veterans, for interview after interview before and after this sneak peek at PEARL HARBOR before 2,000 on the carrier's 4.5-acre flight deck. When the black, oily smoke had cleared, TV's lumps in the throat did what Disney expected them to do, what Disney had invited them there to do. They fell all apart.”
When Harry and I talked about my reasons for deciding not to see PEARL HARBOR (I’ll explain below), I told him a lot of it was due to the way it had been sold. I found it off-putting. As I mentioned, we visited Bay Films twice during production, and both times, we were welcomed by Jennifer Klein and by Michael himself. Both times, we were shown bits and pieces of the film out of context. The first time, it was a batch of animatics for the film’s central attack sequence. The second time, we saw about 15 to 20 minutes of the attack, quite a bit of the footage with Kate Beckinsale and the distorted lens effect in the attack’s aftermath, and the scene where FDR stands up. I thought what we saw was interesting, but not terribly persuasive. Still, I was willing to walk in open minded until a few weeks ago when Disney kicked into high gear and poisoned me.
There’s something ghoulish about the way they’ve been feeding off this particular corpse, and the way their temporary leave of sanity seems to have infected so many others. Every network did a PEARL HARBOR related something despite the fact that we’re seven months away from the actual anniversary of the attack. Why do all these specials for this weekend?
And speaking of this weekend and TV programming, where was Roger Ebert in all this?
“PEARL HARBOR is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them.”
Those are strong words about Disney’s biggest box-office offering of the season, Roger.
They would have been stronger had they been delivered to a national television audience this weekend, the opening weekend of the movie.
For many Americans, the tradition of “thumbs up, thumbs down” has become shorthand for any and all film criticism, and no matter what anyone thinks about the rest of the critical press, Roger’s opinion via his television show is a trusted presence in American culture.
So, yes, it bothers me that Disney produces his show and for some reason, he sat this weekend out, choosing to do a special DVD show instead. I understand; I love my bookcase full of DVDs more than I love my sister, but this is a case of priorities. If PEARL HARBOR is as bad as Ebert says it is, then he should have been there, toe to toe with it in the marketplace this weekend. Instead, he’s written it a free pass. By next weekend, word of mouth will have kicked in, and Ebert’s slam of the film on his show will be an empty gesture.
And that’s where I found myself as the weekend finally arrived. Just generally sort of disgusted with the whole thing. I didn’t have any feelings about the film, but the way it was sold to me left me totally uninterested. I felt like I was being told that I had to see it, that I had no choice, that it was the only logical thing to do this weekend. And when a film’s hype becomes that overwhelming, I tend to shut down and back off. Occasionally, I am totally absorbed in it, as I was for EPISODE I, but that’s uncommon these days. In this case, I decided I wasn’t going to waste one minute of my birthday weekend fighting lines for this film or sitting in a theater showing it. I decided that if I was going to see it, it would be a couple of weeks from the opening, once the crowds had thinned, once the noise had died down, when I could just see it and have my own reaction, no baggage attached. I know marketing and the actual movie are different things, and I felt myself becoming predisposed towards one because of the other in a way that wasn’t going to be fair to the film.
Then I tried to see MOULIN ROUGE. Three different times. To no avail. Because it’s f’ing busy.
And I was on the phone with my new girl, telling her about MOULIN ROUGE, and she asked to go see PEARL HARBOR instead. I hesitated for a moment, and she said, “Please?”
Some things are more powerful than even Disney hype turned up to full volume.
Long line? Sure. No problem. Sold out? Yeah, but it was on 2,000 screens in a two square block area in Burbank so we found one that wasn’t sold out and we went to eat dinner in the meantime. All things considered, it was a lovely, leisurely evening, and as the trailers played, I was in a perfect movie-viewing mood. The new FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING trailer helped a lot. It’s a brilliant, magical piece of filmmaking, 2:41 that convey more emotion and adventure than anything I’ve seen in a theater this year.
And then the film starts, no logos up front. Just the shot of the crop duster against the swollen red sun and the single title: PEARL HARBOR.
Cinema is a language. There are certain things that are done in mainstream film that are simply part of that language, basic punctuation marks, and when those things are done in certain variant patterns, it means something. There’s a message being sent.
When a film eschews the standard opening studio logos and simply has a main title and no credits, it tells us that what we are about to see is important. It means something. This is not just a movie. This is a journey. We’re about to go somewhere, and when we reach that other side, we will be changed for having gone. Michael Bay knows how to use the moment, knows full well what he’s saying, and his running time says the exact same thing. You don’t ask your audience for three hours or more of their time unless you’ve got something to say.
”You are so beautiful it hurts.”
”It’s your nose that hurts.”
”No... it’s my heart.”
PEARL HARBOR, screenplay by Randall Wallace
It was David Poland who directed my attention to the story about Randall Wallace’s attempt to distance himself from PEARL HARBOR via an appearance on RUSH & MALLOY over the weekend. Poor form. Wallace went through arbitration in order to get sole screenplay credit on the film. He’s publishing his own novelization of the film, a piece of “serious” fiction. He’s moved on already to a film he’s both writing and directing, a film I gave a very favorable script review to recently called WE WERE SOLDIERS ONCE AND YOUNG. At this point, Wallace should take the lumps for this film. He wrote it in large part, and people familiar with the various drafts all agree that the final film reflects what Wallace originally set down. The film is riddled with historical inaccuracies too numerous to mention, many of which have already appeared in the various Talk Backs under Harry’s review and Alexandra DuPont’s review, but after a certain number, you just stop caring. This film was obviously not intended as a history lesson. Ben Affleck himself told me so, barfing up the party line every time I saw his mug grinning on another of his junket appearances. “History is subjective, and winners write history, and this isn’t history, but if it was, it would subjective, because that’s what history is, and that’s the truth about history, which is true. And subjective.” Isn’t Affleck supposed to be a fan of Howard Zinn, one of the most interesting historians working in America right now? Or am I getting the feeling that Damon was the Zinn fan?
If there’s any one great flaw to PEARL HARBOR, it is the screenplay. It is, simply put, one of the worst structured films I’ve ever seen. There’s no excuse for this to be three plus hours. Not with this story. I don’t think I would have liked a short film any better, but I certainly would have disliked it quicker. Structurally, this film builds to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Anything afterwards is anticlimax by definition. There were a dozen different ways to restructure the love story to make it pay off completely with that attack sequence.
The portrayal of the Japanese in the film is as patently offensive as the portrayal of Dorrie Miller, played here by Cuba Gooding Jr., who seems to still be accepting his Academy Award in every role he plays. I expect backflips and chest-thumping each time he appears, and he’s given any number of golden opportunities to be both celebratory and stoic, his two settings. His role is as clear-cut a case of tokenism in mainstream films as I’ve ever seen, and pointing out to me that Dorrie Miller was real only reinforces the point. He was real, but this script doesn’t do a damn thing right in capturing what life for Miller must have been like. Instead, it reduces him to a handful of scenes, each one a cliché, and it ties things up with a nice neat bow. His is a great story, and one worth telling. It’s done mere lip service here, and that’s a shame.
Like Miller, the Japanese are viewed through the prism of the 21st century. This film doesn’t present a view of the world the way it must have been in the ‘40s. Instead, it offers us a Levi’s commercial version of the ‘40s, all icons and symbols and shorthand. The idea that the Japanese stood around, saddened by the role they were forced to play in WWII, is patently absurd, and any serious study of the forces in play at the time would render it impossible to watch these scenes without laughing loudly. The Japanese generals are directed to mug for the camera like Iron Eyes Cody, the Indian who cried in the anti-pollution TV spots back in the ‘70s. It’s shameless revisionism, as is the portrayal of President Roosevelt (Jon Voight). I give credit to Voight and to the makeup team on the film. It’s a fairly convincing recreation of the man on the outside. There’s nothing for Voight to play here, though, aside from one tremendously corny scene. It seems pointless to cut to FDR in Washington. We don’t learn anything at all about the real political maneuvering that was going on here. The subject of how FDR made his decisions in the early days of WWII is one that could fuel two movies, much less an interesting subplot in a big action epic.
That reminds me... James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Philip Kaufman, Terrence Malick, Richard Donner, and a handful of other filmmakers should get together and petition the DGA to be given co-directing credit on this one. Bay has lifted so many visual ideas from so many other stronger filmmakers at this point that he seems to have confused the meanings of any of the moves at this point, slapping them together haphazardly, leading the film to lurch forward in fits and starts as Bay’s powers of pastiche fail him here and he ends up with a Frankenstein monster, stitched together and out of control.
By film’s end, I remained unconvinced that Ben Affleck can carry a film. I’ve seen FORCES OF NATURE, BOUNCE, ARMAGEDDON, and even PHANTOMS, and I’ve never seen anything that would suggest he has the charisma to be the center of a film of this size. At his best, Affleck is an amiable goofball. His one moment of inspired performance in this film is a bit of slapstick early on with a champagne bottle, but it leads to the dialogue above, as mawkish and phony as the infamous “animal crackers in the underwear’ scene in ARMAGEDDON. Affleck and Beckinsale have nothing resembling chemistry, nor do Beckinsale and Hartnett. One can’t help but feel these actors were affordable, and that’s the best that can be said about the reasons they were put together. All three have done good work in films like CHASING AMY and THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, so the fault can’t possibly lie with them... can it?
Peppering the film with familiar character faces from better films and other walks of life is an old familiar Bruckheimer tactic, and he doesn’t disappoint here. I couldn’t help but happily bark “SPUD!!” the first time Ewan Bremner showed up onscreen. Every time I saw him, I thought, “Your leeeah-sure... is mah pleeeeah-sure,” and pictured him in TRAINSPOTTING, an astonishing cartoon with a human core. Here, he’s just a cartoon. He’s got a stutter, he’s named Red, and he gets to smooch James King a bit. William Fichtner, so good so often in films as disparate as CONTACT and ALBINO ALLIGATOR, is wasted here in an embarrassing early scene. Tom Sizemore seems to be defined by his goofy hat. Alec Baldwin makes me nervous as Dolittle. Can’t put my finger on what it is. There’s just something corpulent and mannered about his work that puts me off. When Leland Orser showed up as “the twitchy guy who’s freaking out,” I entertained the fleeting thought of walking out. Orser is literally a walking cliché now. He’s done the twitchy freak out in so many times now that it has no power. It’s a joke.
Hans Zimmer’s score for the film and the Faith Hill song that plays over the closing credits are both sonic wallpaper, inoffensive and unmemorable, and it’s the perfect compliment to John Schwartzmann’s lovely but hollow and often inappropriate cinematography.
I could go on, but it seems to me that PEARL HARBOR is already in the cultural rear-view, chewed up over the course of the holiday weekend, and I’ve pretty much said everything I wanted to. Normally, I wouldn’t have even written this review, since the film’s already out there in the marketplace, but I got so many letters and I got asked about it so often in chat, it just seemed right. If you were expecting more rancor, a la my CELL review, I’m sorry to disappoint. I don’t think the film’s worth getting that hot over. If I were to say something positive, I’d say this is the closest Bay’s come yet to making something that actually looks like a real movie. To anyone who says I can't simply shut my brain off and enjoy the ride, I say I don't understand how anyone can. To me, being asked not to think about something in order to enjoy it automatically makes it suspect. I'm entertained by things that make me think. It's all part of the same thing.
In the end, my favorite film of Bay’s is only 60 seconds long, a commercial last year that involved two invisible lovers getting together and shedding clothes with abandon. It was funny and well shot and even a little sexy with what it suggested. There was more genuine human emotion in the interaction between those two special effects... between two invisible people... than there is in three hours of PEARL HARBOR.
Infamy, indeed.
"Moriarty" out.
"Moriarty" out.
