Review of Pearl Harbor (2001) by Filipeneto — 12 Dec 2018

The Second World War is undoubtedly the conflict that cinema most portrayed. The movie list is almost inexhaustible but the good movies list is much smaller, and I don't know if "Pearl Harbor" can enter that list. Addressing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the main American military port in the Pacific at the time, the film has huge cons. Michael Bay tried to focus on realism, historical accuracy, romance (the lead story is a love triangle, in which two childhood friends engage the same girl) and special effects, trying to do something different and better than it's direct competitors, with whom it would inevitably be compared (for example, the enshrined "Tora Tora Tora" or the more recent "Saving Private Ryan").

But despite all the hard work, the film exaggerates so much in everything that has lost quality. For example, the love story that links all events (ranging from the Battle of Britain to the Doolittle Raid) is so sappy and cliched that it seems to have been copied from a cheap novel or a soap opera. The film is so sugary that it was even compared to "Titanic" because of that. To make things worse, the characters are so poorly constructed that the audience never really cares about them. What interest does it have if that girl dates one of those guys, the two, or goes to a convent? Although they gained notoriety with this film, Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale were not able to shine at all and I think they will not carry good memories of this film. Other problems in the script are the "black-and-white" perspective of war and world, and the inability to portray facts outside the "canonical version" of the story: Americans are the good guys, who were quiet in their corner, japs are the bad guys who treacherously attacked that little Hawaiian paradise. Although the film shows that there was an imminent danger of an attack and that statement was discredited, it never shows the great interest that the US (and Roosevelt) really had in being attacked, in order to finally be able to fully justify the entering into a war that would make economy (still trying to get back up from the 1929 crash) make a lot of money. We know that there are even indications that the US provoked Japan in order to be attacked. The film ignores all this, preferring to portray American heroism, but historical accuracy shouldn't be limited to the choice of an airplane or paint for a ship, but must also (and mainly) be used in the way the story is told to the public. That didn't happen here.

If the script is bad and very fragile, the film improves when we observe the technical questions. The special effects are good, the state of the art when the film was released, but they end up catching your attention so grandly that you stop believing what you see. You don't feel the danger, you know they will survive by a hair, threading the plane through a hole in a needle or by some other unbelievable way. Then you just watch and expect them to finish playing with the planes and blow things up. The soundtrack is forgettable, and the best are in fact a few hits from the Forties that were introduced in the film.