Armageddon may have topped the global box office in 1998, but here in the US, it was just barely edged out by Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Saving Private Ryan. It came hot on the heels of the 50th anniversary of WWII. The lionization of that war’s veterans was in full swing with things like Spielberg’s film and Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation”. And I’m sure this got Michael Bay all worked up when the box office receipts came in. So it’s little wonder that his next film was an attempt to ride that gravy train just as it was pulling into the station.
As I sat down to revisit Pearl Harbor for the first time in 20 years, this was the narrative I had built in my head. “Michael Bay wanted his Saving Private Ryan.” And to some degree, that’s what this is. But that’s not the whole story. As mentioned in my Armageddon piece, Bay openly admitted that the entire Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler love story was a late-in-the-game reaction to James Cameron’s Titanic. And that dynamic is very much in play with Pearl Harbor, which feels like Bay’s attempt to marry the nostalgic reverence of Spielberg’s film with the sweeping romance and disaster movie scope of Cameron’s. “Saving Private Ryan meets Titanic” isn’t such a bad idea on paper. With the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack on the horizon, the time seemed right, and you really can’t blame the Bay/Bruckheimer/Disney machine for taking their shot.
Rather than dramatize the events of December 7, 1941 as they happened, Pearl Harbor invents a whole cast of fictional characters and plays them off as the heroes of the entire story. There are plenty of real historical figures here, including noted right-wing wacko Jon Voight as Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the lion’s share of the cast are fictional ciphers for the pilots, sailors and nurses who actually lived through the attack. Private Ryan and Titanic do the same thing, of course. The difference is that Private Ryan is pretty open about being loosely based on the situation of the brothers Niland, while the sinking of the Titanic is just outside the scope of our living history, which takes some of the sting out of it. (Only one documented survivor even saw the movie. She was a baby when the ship went down.)
Instead of dramatizing any one person’s actual experience, Pearl Harbor invents a love triangle between two best friends, Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett), and Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), the nurse they both fall for. Rafe and Danny become ace pilots under the command of Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), who sends Rafe overseas to fly for the RAF in England. He sees the brutality of war firsthand, as he inherits a fighter plane whose cockpit is riddled with bullet holes and stained in blood. Evelyn and Danny, meanwhile, get shipped out to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a place everyone assumes will be a boring tropical paradise half a world away from the actual war. One nurse gives a tour of the infirmary to the new recruits by saying “Here’s ward 3. As you can see: No patients. Welcome to Hawaii.” This sort of dramatic irony is littered throughout the first hour of this film and it’s frankly a little insulting. Morbid, really. Haha, I get it. People are gonna die.
Meanwhile, the film cuts back and forth between the Japanese military carefully plotting their attack on Pearl Harbor (spearheaded by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), and US intelligence desperately trying to figure out what the Japanese are doing. Most of these scenes involve Dan Aykroyd interpreting reports with the kind of screwball comedy patter that only Aykroyd can deliver. He’s wildly out of place in this kind of movie, and all I can think is that someone saw Spielberg’s 1941, which starred Aykroyd in a pivotal role, and thought it would be fun to make him live through all this again.
Like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor is split into the three distinct acts that any good disaster movie should have. Act one introduces all our players; we see the pilots and nurses having their meet-cutes and being young and dumb, while the Powers That Be move their chess pieces into place (literally in a couple of scenes). Then act two hits with the attack itself, the classic problem that a good disaster story needs for our heroes to overcome. This is where the film really shines, which is kind of a horrible thing to say about any war movie, but Bay doesn’t shy away from how brutal and tragic the whole affair was. He bristled at Disney forcing him to cut the violence to get a PG-13 rating, but you could’ve fooled me. Some of the chaotic violence is a little too real, but then that’s certainly the point, isn’t it? And then the third act finds our heroes lacing up their boots and fighting back as Rafe, Danny and all the other pilots sign up for the famous Doolittle Raid.
The fact that the movie ends with the Doolittle Raid feels… wrong. Like this really isn’t what the movie is about. It’s about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and how that attack shocked the US into taking World War II seriously. The way the Doolittle Raid is presented here, it feels like a little bit of Top Gun sneaking into the movie just to give American audiences something to cheer about as they leave the theater. It’s pretty hard to cheer at the end of the Harbor attack sequence, though watching Tom Sizemore and Michael Shannon shoot down a plane with a couple of shotguns is kind of fun. It just makes for a strange tonal shift, mourning such a brutal attack and then turning around to show our heroes plan their own attack and act like they won something out of it.
I can see the storytelling gears turning, though. The movie can’t end with Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, FDR declaring December 7th “a date which will live in infamy”, and then fade to black with a title card reading “The United States won World War II”. That would be too dark and unsatisfying. So let’s continue the story and put our made up characters in another military action, and this time one of them can sacrifice himself so that we can finally resolve our love triangle that instantly became meaningless the moment the bombs dropped on the Harbor. It just winds up making the whole thing seem silly and unnecessary. Not to mention completely sidelining the C-plot of Petty Officer Doris Miller, a real sailor who defended the USS West Virginia during the attack. He’s played here by Cuba Gooding, Jr., and it’s a shame I’ve gotten this far into the review without even mentioning him. It almost feels like a bone being thrown to the people concerned with Pearl Harbor being historically accurate. According to a lot of pieces I’ve read, Gooding’s scenes are the only parts of the movie that have any basis in fact at all.
Stylistically, though, Pearl Harbor is gorgeous; maybe Michael Bay’s best looking film to date. He’s finally shaken off the Tony Scott influence from his music video days and really leans into his most nakedly jingoistic tendencies. There are a lot of shots of American flags in this movie. I was tempted to start counting them, but realized pretty quickly that was a fool’s errand. But the blockbuster sized grandeur of the battleships, the sweeping shots of airplanes flying through Hawaiian valleys… Bay really knows how to shoot a good looking piece of propaganda.
The whole thing falls apart with the story being told. It’s hard to care for a love triangle of three fictional characters with the weight of history bearing down on them. Affleck and Beckinsale seem pretty checked out of the whole affair. Their initial meet-cute scenes are fine, with Rafe begging Evelyn to overlook his dyslexia during his eye exam (which is then never referenced again), but it quickly becomes apparent that none of these people are suited for old-school rom-com shtick in the slightest. It’s probably for the best, because the actual romance is hilariously brief. They fall in love, he leaves, he ‘dies’, she moves on to his best friend, he returns, bickering ensues until Japan attacks and everyone forgets it ever happened. I just summed the whole plot up in one sentence!
That, along with the movie’s weird insistence on making up the facts of a very well-documented event just makes the whole endeavor feel tasteless. The attack sequence even features an amateur cameraman filming the bombing for posterity, even though he’s following Rafe and Danny around and filming things that never actually happened. That cameraman is shot dead and his camera left in the rubble, so maybe that’s Bay’s way of saying “These events really happened but all the evidence was destroyed.” Again, tasteless.
Even today, watching this movie just feels like a huge missed opportunity. I was really rooting for history to prove the naysayers wrong, but there’s no way around it: Pearl Harbor is a baldly cynical movie about one of America’s darkest days, and twisting the narrative around to manufacture reasons to care sinks an already overlong movie. They could have written this story a dozen different ways and it would have been both more compelling and more respectful of the dead. I don’t blame Michael Bay for that. He just got swept up in the nostalgia parade and wanted to play his part.
Pearl Harbor is largely remembered as Bay’s first real dud. It made money, becoming the sixth highest-grossing film of 2001, but the film quickly became a laughingstock for being so egregiously maudlin and taking so many liberties with the actual history behind the story. There’s an entire love ballad in Team America: World Police that’s a blatant diss track on Pearl Harbor. The tide had turned on Michael Bay as a blockbuster director. And coming so soon before the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I’m sure the sting of rejection hurt pretty bad.
One of the threads I keep following here is Bay seeming to ride Spielberg’s coattails. While Bay was busy with Pearl Harbor, Spielberg had gotten the WWII nostalgia out of his system and moved on to shadowing Stanley Kubrick with the heady, dystopian robots of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. That film came out a month after Pearl Harbor and, while it made considerably less at the box office that summer, it’s since become recognized as one of Spielberg’s late career masterpieces. It wouldn’t be long before Michael Bay would take another stab at science fiction, and he’d get his fill of robots soon enough too. Before he could do that, though, he had to return to his roots and get all these bad vibes out of his system.
UP NEXT: One of Edgar Wright’s favorite movies.
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