Cinema
Pearl Harbor (12, selected cinemas)
Who cares?
Mark Steyn Those Krauts and Japs have all the luck. They may have lost the war, but they're getting a shorter print of Pearl Harbor: Disney execs have been busy snipping out bits of dialogue in order to avoid giving offence to German and Japanese audiences. To avoid giving offence to Englishspeaking audiences, they should have cut all the dialogue.
Connoisseurs will have their favourite moments. I greatly enjoyed the scene between Danny and Evelyn. It begins with a subtitle: 'Three months later.' Then Danny says, 'I can't believe it's been three months since I saw you.' But Evelyn also loves Rafe (and no, it's not pronounced 'Ralph). She enters his room and sees him packing. 'Packing?' she says. Michael Bay then cuts to a close-up of the suitcase, with folded clothes inside. In its exquisite laboriousness, this encapsulates the picture's style more than any of the explosions. Bay's last blockbuster, Armageddon, was criticised for being fast-moving but shallow. So he's now made a film that's slow-moving but even shallower.
We begin in lyrical, cornpone Tennessee, where two little boys have two little toys. Gaily they'd play each summer's day, warriors both, of course. One boy is Rafe (Ben Affleck), who as the male lead has been given the designated trait: he's dyslexic, which may well be an advantage with a screenplay by Randall Wallace. Danny (Josh Hartnett) is The Buddy, so he has no trait. The years roll by to 1940 and Rafe and Danny are now flyboys playing chicken during training sessions on Long Island. Those nitpicky historians hung up on obscure facts and stuff will be reassured to know that Hollywood has an equally shaky grip on East Coast topography: this Long Island has spectacular mountains, presumably bulldozed when they built Alec Baldwin's place in the Hamptons.
Speaking of which, here's Alec himself as Colonel Doolittle handing Rafe his official papers immediately ordering him to England to fly with the RAF, Between 1939 and 1941, many brave Yank airmen volunteered as individuals for the RAF and RCAF but they weren't assigned to foreign air forces by their American commanders as that would have been in breach of US neutrality. Still, it does give Rafe's sweetheart, Evelyn, the opportunity to see him off at Grand Central Station: apparently, in those days, to get from New York to England, you took the train.
When it pulls in at Victoria, Rafe discovers that England is hell. Not only is it damp but, unlike back home, where the pilots have the healthy glow of a 1950s gay bodybuilding magazine, the local air aces are weedy, pasty, thin-lipped anti-hunks whose feeble Battle of Britain is sorely in need of a bit of Yankee derring-do. 'The German Luftwaffe relentlessly bombards downtown London,' intones the newsreel announcer, the authentic period flavour of his script matched only by the bass reverb of his Kiss-FM delivery, 'while Churchill's Royal Air Force struggles to maintain control of the British skies.' Fortunately, Rafe is there to save downtown London.
But half a world away Imperial Japan is preparing to attack Pearl Harbor to protest about the US oil embargo. Hmm. If you're doing a GCSE essay on root causes of the second world war, don't quote me on that one Soon, Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) is going full steam ahead and cabling Tokyo with his own subtitles, translated from the original gibberish: The rise and fall of our empire is at stake!' Both the rise and the fall are at stake?
There follows 40 minutes of carnage that come as a welcome respite from the interminable triangle of Evelyn, Danny and Rafe. Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) seems vaguely to resent the interruption. It's been difficult enough trying to deal with her feelings, she says irritably, 'and then all this happened', 'this' being the surrounding scenes of widespread devastation. The attack itself is played virtually in real time, a la Saving Private Ryan, but is completely uninvolving. Who's being bombed? Who's doing the bombing? I counted over 100 names in the cast list, yet the film has a total absence of humanity. On a Hawaii with no Hawaiians, anonymous Japs battle cardboard Yankees. Who cares?
Having wiped out America's Pacific Fleet, Yamamoto remarks, 'I fear all we have done is to waken a sleeping giant.' That would be me, I thought, waking with a start. So I got up to leave. But, amazingly, the movie hadn't ended, and suddenly lurched into what seems like an entirely separate film about the Doolittle Raid (it already is a separate film: 30 Seconds Over Tokyo), in which four months after Pearl Harbor Colonel Doolittle led a couple of dozen bomber pilots on a crazy but moraleboosting raid. Hitherto in this movie, Danny and Rafe have been fighter pilots, not bomber pilots, and in reality there were no fighter pilots on the Doolittle Raid, but they're hand-picked for the gig anyway.
Bay's model was clearly Titanic: a love story set against the sweep of history. But, in Titanic, the love-across-the-classes romance sharpened the bigger picture. Here, the love story doesn't arise organically from the war, and doesn't illuminate any aspects of it: it's just a lame triangle. And Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid don't really connect, either. The Americans are not temperamentally inclined to the Dunkirk Spirit, and those of us who wondered what Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer were doing making a movie about a US military debacle are forced to the conclusion that maybe they only discovered it was a Jap victory halfway through shooting. In tacking a happy ending on to Pearl Harbor, they wind up missing the significance of the event: the only occasion in modern warfare when the US has been playing at home — when its own territory briefly came under the kind of assault that for Britain, France, Belgium et al is par for the course. Pearl Harbor was, as they say, a 'defining moment', the end of American isolationism. Pearl Harbor The Film testifies only to the new American cultural isolationism in which even the recent past is beyond the comprehension of Hollywood.
And why worry about Japanese sensitivity? Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands and arrested 22 British watchkeepers. The following year, they tied them to trees, beheaded them and burned their bodies in a pit. The Japs fought a filthy war whose depravities they've never been made to confront. It does 'em good to be reminded every so often. And, if Hollywood is too craven even to be jingoistic, then what exactly is it for?
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