Pearl Harbor (2001)
Budget: 140 Million
Box Office: 449.2 Million
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 25
Number of Explosions: 65
“If trouble wants me I’m ready for it. But why go looking for it?”
Writing about Michael Bay is difficult because his artistry is somewhat unrelated to whether his movies are bad. Armageddon is a great example of a mediocre movie where Bay’s excellent storytelling skills are on display. And it’s hard to think of another director who could have portrayed the titular scene in Pearl Harbor with such fearlessness and lack of sentiment.
Rafe and Danny come straight out of middle America, starting the film as young boys literally playing in a cornfield. They are the American pastoral dream. They are the life people talk about when they talk about the “the good old days.” Full of masculinity, imaginary violence, heterosexuality, and child abuse. It is no surprise, then, when Pearl Harbor ends with the isolationist character dying and leaving his interventionist counterpart to a life embodying the American spirit.
“Not anxious to die. Just anxious to matter.”
The movie traverses decades, countries, and languages, yada-yada-ing a majority of World War II but focusing earnestly on the relationship between Rafe, Danny, and the girl with whom they both fall in love.
Speaking of girls, the way Pearl Harbor treats women is incredibly offensive. The fact that every named female character in the movie is a nurse can be explained away, I suppose, by historical accuracy, but the fact that the only thing the female characters do is jabber to each other about how to meet men is off-putting and rings false next to the two male leads who are driven by honor and integrity and freedom. Kate Beckinsale plays the female lead, Evelyn, who pouts for a majority of the movie’s 3 hour run time in lieu of having a man on screen to motivate her.
So Pearl Harbor is generally trite, boring, and muddled. But the 45 minute scene portraying the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the great action scenes I’ve ever watched.
You can debate Bay’s motives, or whether his worldview leads to interesting or effective stories, but he knows how to execute the significance of a moment. Especially a moment filled with action. He doesn’t shy away from complexity and captures the minutiae of a detailed and terrifying moment while still showing the broadest strokes.
Combining computer-generated graphics with fantastic photography and precise editing, the attack on Pearl Harbor is horrific, fascinating, and suspenseful. It feels fast-paced and electric but also dreadfully long. It feels inevitable due to the 90 minutes of slow pacing leading up to the moment of the attack, but also depressingly avoidable, due to the reactions of the various analysts and politicians who denied that the U.S. was vulnerable.
If Pearl Harbor was truly the story of Pearl Harbor, I think I would have liked it. The movie could have been an hour and a half, with a gripping action scene and minor exposition introducing us to the characters surrounding the event. We know Bay can direct effective, concise exposition because we saw it in Armageddon. Rafe and Danny serving as key protagonists as well as metaphors for America’s ambivalence about entering World War II would have worked as a guide for the audience through the events of the attack.
Instead, Pearl Harbor is a 2 hour love triangle where you never really get the sense that any of the characters are right for each other. And there is a long, out of place, interlude of an action scene.
It’s hard to believe that Michael Bay was that invested in the emotional core of this love story. But it’s worth remembering that 2001, the year of Pearl Harbor’s release, was at a peak moment in overlong love stories hidden in historical dramas. Titanic. The Last Samurai. And many more.
The thing I think makes Pearl Harbor so unwatchable, in the end, is the humorlessness of its subject matter. Bay’s movies are ridiculous. Armageddon, so obviously unscientific its premise, can be read as a comedy of errors and campy melodrama set in a disaster movie framework. The characters in The Rock are such exaggerated personalities that they captivate us in spite of their personal stories rather than because of them. And Bad Boys is just an out-and-out comedy. Pearl Harbor can’t be funny, and can’t even really be fun, because the subject matter is so morose, so it ends up feeling juvenile and vapid.
It’s also a movie that I think Bay had to try his hand at, similar to how Tom Cruise had to star in Born on the Fourth of July and Far and Away to realize he couldn’t succeed in a charmless drama, that he was Alec Baldwin instead of Daniel Day Lewis (speaking of which Alec Baldwin is pure gas in Pearl Harbor, playing the dickhole sales leader from Glengarry Glen Ross if he were a fighter pilot).
Bay needed to realize that he was not Steven Spielberg, despite their similarities in style. And his post Pearl Harbor choices largely denote a commitment to fun distractions. We need our distractions.
Next: Bad Boys II
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