Movie Review Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Directed by Michael Bay 

Written by Randall Wallace

Starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Sizemore, Alec Baldwin

Release Date May 25th, 2001

Published May 25th, 2011 

The blockbuster Pearl Harbor turns 10 years old this month and so I decided to look back on it with new eyes a decade later.

Movies are not living things; they don’t grow or change or evolve over time. Once a film is completed it will, generally speaking, be as it is forever. What does change? We do. We age and we mature and our intellect and tastes evolve over time. Our ever evolving tastes and growing intellect can change the way we experience a movie.

It is with this in mind that I endeavor to look back 10, 20 and 30 years at some of the most well remembered movies of all time and see how my own evolving tastes effect the way I experience these movies. I invite you to join me on this unique journey and offer your own insights ever changing opinions.

Evolving the human element

The blockbuster Pearl Harbor turns 10 years old in May of 2011. My first experience with Pearl Harbor was not good. I was in my second year as a full time film critic for a now defunct website called Bikkit.com. The website and my original Pearl Harbor review are long gone but I can recall a scathing, often snide review that may have invoked the words jingoistic and manipulative.

I have always been very hard on director Michael Bay. He has an extraordinary talent for scope and scale and could be fairly considered a modern day Darryl Zanuck or D.W Griffith, filmmakers of the grandest vision. Disappointingly, for all his talent for staging massive productions, Bay has never evolved the human element of his filmmaking.

Disingenuous and insincere

The characters in a Michael Bay film are stick figures weighted down by leaden dialogue and sublimated by large scale special effects. Sadly, Pearl Harbor is no different from any other Michael Bay film. Despite a harrowing historic tale, Bay delivers characters in Pearl Harbor that never resonate and never come to life before our eyes.

So busy is Michael Bay restaging one of the worst days in American history with painstaking detail, he forgets to populate his stage with characters of resonance whose experiences we can believe in. Two false, forced romances and several coat hanger characters--actors assigned to hold up archetypes of real people—leave Pearl Harbor feeling disingenuous and insincere.

Faux romance

The glossy, 1940’s style romance of Pearl Harbor is a cheesy throwback that lacks passion because it’s infused only with nostalgia. Ben Affleck is a terrific actor but teamed with Kate Beckinsale in a series of facile romantic encounters he leaves no real impression beyond his handsomeness and her beauty.

Josh Hartnett brings a soulful quality to the character of Danny and his struggle with falling for his best friend’s girl but Michael Bay has no interest in exploring or allowing these characters to expand upon the difficulty of their situation. Instead, we get scenes of the happy couple swimming and frolicking in the sand as stand-ins for real interaction.

The dual romances appear in Pearl Harbor not because the story was of interest to Michael Bay or screenwriter Randall Wallace. No, the romance exists solely as a marketing ploy, a way to sell a war movie to mass audiences. Instead of being honestly romantic the love triangle subplot cheapens the movie and makes all around it feel hollow.

Undeniably awesome CGI effects

There is tremendous power to be found in the action scenes of Pearl Harbor. I have no honest idea how well Michael Bay and his exceptionally talented team captured what December 7th 1941 was like but the veterans of that day, interviewed on the Pearl Harbor DVD, offer no criticism.

The action, especially an extraordinary dogfight sequence early in the film while Affleck’s pilot Rafe McCawley is fighting with the British against the Germans, is as exciting an action sequence as any you’ve ever seen. The Pearl Harbor sequence is a monotonous onslaught of special effects and CGI but they are very effective special effects and CGI and you are hard pressed not to be compelled by the action.

Gorgeous Cinematography

The cinematography of Pearl Harbor is immaculate. The deep focus and bright colors of Pearl Harbor add to the scope and scale of the story and create some unbelievably beautiful pictures. The gorgeous orange skyline of a scene where Hartnett and Beckinsale go for an unscheduled flight around the Hawaiian Islands threatens to create the romance that the actors never muster.

In many ways Pearl Harbor is a remarkable film. Michael Bay has the vision of Howard Hughes and the limitless imagination of old school directors like Howard Hawks and Victor Fleming. Bay only lacks the human element. Were Michael Bay ever to figure out how to make his characters as compelling as his special effects he would be a rival to James Cameron and Steven Speilberg as a mainstream artist.

A decade later the same result

Unfortunately, in the 10 years since the making of Pearl Harbor Michael Bay has not developed the human touch; in fact with his Transformers movies he has regressed even further into a director of automatons.

In the end, my experience with Pearl Harbor 10 years later was not much different than it was the first time. I’ve dropped the word jingoistic as it seemed a little harsh in retrospect and I have offered a little more praise for the effects than I did the first time but my overall experience of the film is fundamentally the same. I still don’t like it, the flaws that I saw as a young, fiery junior critic are still seen as flaws to the much calmer, measured and professional critic of today.