A big summer blockbuster, Pearl Harbor is pitched as a romantic
epic, but the story is essentially a frame for an impressive
depiction of the Japanese attack on that "day of infamy",
deploying all the modelwork, CGI, stunts and special effects
necessary to trump previous screen re-enactments in Tora! Tora!
Tora! and From Here to Eternity. At heart, it's another Top
-style exercise in heroically sublimated sexuality as Rafe
(Ben Affleck) and Dan (Josh Hartnett), lifelong buddies, fall out
over a ridiculous contrivance that allows both decently to fallin
love with a nurse (Kate Beckinsale) but forget all their
differences when the fighting starts--as expected, their big
climax comes in each other's arms, with Kate left behind as one
wounded buddy extracts a promise from the other to look after his
unborn child.
Historical snippets are interleaved, with Mako and Jon Voigt
stiff under the prosthetics asAdmiral Yamamoto and Franklin
Roosevelt, and a lot of detail is given about things like the
wooden rudders on the new Japanese torpedoes, the chaos in the
understaffed hospital as the heroine is forced to make lipstick
triage marks on wounded men's foreheads and the terrible effects
of strafing. A surprisingly bright little performance from Dan
Aykroyd (a sole reminder of 1941) as an intelligence analyst is
balanced by an insufferably smug one from Cuba Gooding Jr as a
token black supporting hero. It's the first film of the George W
Bush era: aggressive and dumb as a rock, utterly uninterested in
period--no one in this WWII-era army smokes, swears or uses
racial abuse (Gooding's boxing nent sneers at him because
he's a cook)--and awkwardly straddles a dignified of
the Japanese and America's actual spasm of hatred after the
attack (one soldier refuses to be treated by a Japanese doctor,
but that's it). When Pearl Harbour is bombed, we see endangered
dogs, drowning men and dead women, but when Tokyo gets blasted in
payback only buildings are destroyed and in long-. Michael
Bay (Armageddon) remains a jittery director, a great second-unit
man who can't deal with people or stories. It borrows from
Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, but tidies the war of the latter
up so it can still haul in a broad audience and therefore misses
the real tragic sense of the former.--Kim Newman
On the DVD: Considering there are two discs in the special
edition of this special effects homage, the second DVD is
woefully short of extras. There is a 45-minute featurette on the
highs and lows of bringing Michael Bay's magnum opus to the
screen which, along with the usual interviews with cast and crew,
features the more compelling eyewitness testimony bringing the
events of December 7, 1941 to life. The irony of the second disc
focussing on the research and quest for historical accuracy is a
little difficult to swallow, considering that the film is little
more than a paper thin, overly romanticised muddle of history and
fantasy, but for those wanting to experience the real events on
that eful day rather than the Hollywood version, this is an
excellent antidote. The movie has been THX digitally mastered for
superior sound and picture quality improving those big-bang
special effects and is presented in anamorphic widescreen with
2.35:1 aspect ratio. Unlike the Region 1 release, there's no DTS
track but the 5.1 Dolby Digital sound is more than up to the
challenge of the effects laden assault, with different elements
of the Japanese attack rumbling between the speakers and making
you feel you're in the thick of things. -- Kristen Bowditch