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 model work, CGI, stunts and special effects necessary to trump previous screen re-enactments in and . At heart, it's another -style exercise in heroically sublimated homosexuality as Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Dan (Josh Hartnett), lifelong buddies, fall out over a ridiculous contrivance that allows both to decently fall in 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 as Admiral Yamamoto and Franklin Roosevelt--and a lot of detail is given about such things as 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 opponent sneers at him because he's a cook)--and awkwardly straddles a dignified treatment 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-shot. Michael Bay () remains a jittery director, a great second-unit man who can't deal with people or stories. It borrows from and , 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
Product Description
Jerry Bruckheimer's sprawling tale of love blossoming amidst the chaos of war. Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) is a gung-ho US pilot whose determination to fly against the enemy leads him to Europe and active service in the Battle of Britain. His girlfriend Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) is left waiting at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, and before long tragedy strikes, with the news reaching Evelyn that Rafe has flown off to the great aircraft hanger in the sky. Heartbroken, she is comforted by Rafe's best friend Danny (Josh Hartnett), and romance soon blooms between them. Meanwhile, the Japanese are preparing their forces for the attack which will trigger the US entry into World War Two.
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