Pearl Harbor

10 April 2012

Disney was ominously reluctant to show Pearl Harbor to the critics. Now we can see why. It's ludicrously, uproariously awful - so bad that a packed audience at its first British screening last night laughed at most of the would-be serious moments.

Yes, there are 40 minutes of exciting special effects when the Japanese finally attack, but the rest of the movie doesn't begin to justify its three hours, three minutes of screen time.

Pearl Harbor is from the folks who brought you that monument to mindlessness, Armageddon. This is even dumber. No one expects subtlety or human interest from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay.

You are more likely to get massive explosions and a quasi-mystical belief in the cleansing nature of extreme violence. But the £135million Pearl Harbor is quite staggeringly cynical, a shameless attempt to repeat the success of a quite different blockbuster, Titanic.

For the first hour and a half before the special effects kick in, it's prettily photographed but utterly banal romantic fiction, with two childhood friends turned fighter-pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) falling for the same nurse (Kate Beckinsale). Ben leaves for England to join the Battle of Britain and goes missing, presumed dead, by everyone except the audience.

Then he returns on cue, just in time to experience the carnage at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when the Japanese navy notoriously attacked America's Pacific Fleet at anchor in Hawaii.

Whereupon Franklin D Roosevelt (Jon Voight) rallies the nation, and Ben and Josh avenge their dead colleagues in a daring bombing raid over Tokyo, the importance of which is mightily exaggerated in order to end the movie on a positive, war-winning note, without reference to such minor unpleasantnesses as Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

Notable by its absence is any attempt to discover why America was so unprepared. There is no hint that the American authorities had prior knowledge of the Japanese bombing raid, although evidence has recently come to light which suggests they did, and negligently ignored it.

But let historians attack the movie in their own way. This film isn't really about the Second World War, or love, or indeed any aspect of reality. It's about copying the successful bits in other movies. When the Japanese planes swoop down on the American navy, they are just like Luke and Han Solo attacking Darth Vader in Star Wars.

The sinking of an American warship is shot in a way that creates echoes of Titanic. When the Japanese shoot at Americans underwater, you know that the director has been studying Spielberg's equivalent shots in Saving Private Ryan. Randall Wallace's screenplay is equally secondhand and far more third-rate. It plunders most of the known clichés from other war films, and gives the leading actors little to do except look glamorous.

This they duly do, but not even Kate Beckinsale can breathe life into her dialogue, which requires her to be little more than pretty and dull.

The most striking performance is given by Jon Voight although the filmmakers treat him with such obsequious reverence that the last half-hour degenerates into the same gung-ho patriotism that made so many critics queasy about Bruckheimer's first militaristic hit, Top Gun.

It wasn't the jingoism that upset me about the film, however. It was its affectless approach to violence. Whereas Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan used modern special effects to recreate what it must have felt like to be in the Normandy landings, Messrs Bay and Bruckheimer seem concerned only to capture the adrenaline rush of bombing defenceless American servicemen.

Spielberg's approach was deeply felt and humane. The second approach reduces war to spectacle, carnage to a computer game.

Maybe this won't concern American audiences out for a cheap thrill at their local multiplex; but it concerned me. At least Titanic had some pretensions to a moral message, about the folly of a hubristic pride in technology.

Pearl Harbor the movie is itself a product of that same hubristic pride, the idea that superior special effects can distract audiences from a woeful screenplay and a cast whose main achievement is to speak the unbelievably crass dialogue with a straight face.

I can only hope the public can see through the hype and treat this film with the contempt it deserves. There is nothing in these movie-makers' heads except the urge to make a fast buck.

And the crucial question to bear in mind when watching this movie is: Does it honour the memory of those who died at Pearl Harbor? Or does it give audiences a perverted thrill from watching them die?