Why "Pearl Harbor" Misses the Mark - May 30, 2001, By CMOORE
Unfortunately, the entire spectacle of the preparations for, and the subsequent attack on Hawaii's Pearl Harbor Naval Base - which is unarguably one of the most fantastic and realistic air-war sequences ever brought to film - takes a back seat to the ludicrous mechanics of the main characters' Ménage a Trois. It's a good thing the producers gave us Kate Beckinsale to look at through all this. Beckinsale, who plays Evelyn, the object of Ben Affleck's angst and Josh Hartnett's devotion, fits naturally into her role as a virginal Army nurse, convincing in her purity, and quite beautiful even when covered head to toe in dying soldiers' blood.  But like so much else in Pearl Harbor, we are denied so much as a peek at anything deeper.  It's as if even the war is just window dressing for the aspirations of a few Hollywood heavyweights.          

The other characters drift in and out of view seemingly unattached to the events happening around them.  With a little work, for example, the writers  could have developed a deep and symbolic tragedy out of the relationship between a black cook on the battleship Arizona (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his white captain. But instead, we are only confused by Gooding Jr.'s waning animosity and eventual respect for his superior, and left to ponder for ourselves the implications of race and class in the 1940s that the movie's creators seemed content to leave out. 

A notable exception to all this is Jon Voight's President Roosevelt, a striking performance from a highly respected actor.  Voight brings us Roosevelt the man through Roosevelt the President, playing off the Commander in Chief's physical handicap as a metaphor for the state of a nation.  In Voight's interactions with his counterparts (mostly members of the Roosevelt Cabinet) we get a sense of the turmoil that the President faced during the early war years, as well as his intense feelings of betrayal at the hands of the Japanese. Again, it's only too bad we didn't get a bit more into the head of this man who took on the World.

But that's just touching the surface.  While the writers obviously went to great lengths to ensure a high level of accuracy in the film and got many facts right - including the U.S. intelligence community's struggle to break the Japanese Navy's radio codes, the lone Japanese civilian-spy that gathered most of his information taking Hawaiian sightseeing tours, the wooden fins that the Japanese fitted to their torpedoes to support shallow-water operation, and Colonel Dolittle's daring raid on Tokyo in which B-24s were modified to take off from carriers - they completely fumbled over others. 

One simple observation that I think completely detracted from the movie's believability was that not one person that I can remember smoked through the entire three-hour film.  Now keep in mind, we're talking 1941 here.  Everybody smoked, especially on military bases.  I mean, this is a time when cigarettes were still part of a soldier's daily ration.  It might not seem like much, but to overlook such a basic facet of WWII life exemplifies the whole attitude the movie's creators took towards this film.  Is a WWII drama really the right vehicle for making an anti-smoking message?  Or were the filmmakers trying so hard to recreate history using all the latest digital techniques that they missed something so small that it would require no more than a carton or two of Lucky's? Come on guys!

Only from Hollywood could come a three-hour feature on a topic from which the audience emerges with little or no added understanding of the subject.

But to be fair, Pearl Harbor wasn't created as an educational project, or even a made-for-TV docu-drama, but rather as a summer blockbuster - an entertaining foray into the world of our grandparents.  On this level, it is excusable that more isn't made of Yamamoto's struggle with his superiors to see his Pearl Harbor plan to fruition, or that two decorated fighter pilots just happen to be flying B-24 bombers into Tokyo with little explanation as to why, or that, in the final scene, a group of stranded airmen stand dumbfounded over a fallen comrade in the middle of hostile territory for what seems like an eternity instead of heading for the hills like any sane person in their predicament would.

But what isn't so acceptable is that a 180-minute project devoted entirely to the attack on Pearl Harbor would leave so many unanswered questions. In my view, this is a direct result of the producer's insistence on making this a love story instead of a war movie.  While the scheme may have worked well for Titanic - where 75% of the movie is spent waiting for the great ship to hit an iceberg - the intricacies and intrigue surrounding Japan's attack on the United States leaves little room for exploring a trivial - and frankly, plain bad - love story. 

In the end, Touchstone Pictures got its wish.  Pearl Harbor grossed over $75 million on its opening weekend, even if it did get railed by the critics. All in all, I'd have to say Pearl Harbor was at least entertaining, and well worth seeing if you're at all into WWII aviation. The aerial dog-fighting scenes are fabulous. The lesson of the film's failure on a higher level is simple:  Creating a love story around a piece of history is not a formula for great movies.  What may work in one setting bombs in another. Hopefully Hollywood will hear some of the criticism that is now being hurled at Pearl Harbor and take it to heart when dealing with future historical projects.
By fostering a love triangle so twisted and unbelievable that it is simply impossible to feel anything but anger for the characters involved, it's no wonder the writers had to sacrifice half the movie to allow us to try and figure it out. In a nutshell - boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy goes to war, boy dies, girl is sad, girl is comforted by boy's best friend, girl falls in love with boy's best friend, boy's best friend falls in love with girl, boy's not really dead, boy comes back, girl loves both boy and boy's best friend, girl is pregnant by boy's best friend, girl chooses boy's best friend, boy's best friend goes to war, boy's best friend dies, girl gets back with boy to raise boy's best friend's son - OH BOY!
Sometimes history has a way of repeating itself. I thought of this about 2 hours into the movie "Pearl Harbor" as the bombs and specially modified shallow-water torpedoes fell like hail from Japanese planes onto the unexpecting and innocent folks that made up the Navy's Pacific Fleet.  December 7, 1941 - truly a day that will live in infamy - and a movie which I'm afraid is destined to follow.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is quite what the filmmakers had in mind.  The history that I think the Pearl Harbor folks wanted to repeat was not that of their subject, but rather the unparalleled success of the movie Titanic.  A love story wrapped tightly in the coveralls of an infamous snippet from the World's past. A high-budget extravaganza guaranteed to knock your socks off with amazing visuals, offering the kind of realistic glimpse into a famous event that is only possible with today's advanced production techniques. A piece of Americana recalling a simpler time when our patriotic countrymen joined together to lose their collective innocence and to fight and die together.

But while Titanic surely took it's share of liberties with its historic subject, it at least succeeded in creating a somewhat believable and at times slightly tear-jerking romance between its two main characters, played by Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet. (O.K. so I'm a romantic!)

The same can't be said about Pearl Harbor.
Touchstone's "Pearl Harbor" exemplifies the dangers of mixing cheesy romance with history.