Too Many Zeros. - Review - movie review

National Review, June 25, 2001 by John Simon

How much history can $135,000,000 buy you? Quite a bit, as the three- hour movie Pearl Harbor rousingly demonstrates. It can buy you enough digitally and otherwise created special effects to make the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly as enormous as the real thing, and offer a history lesson that, whether or not it reaches the brain, certainly dilates the eye.

What that tidy little sum cannot buy-at least not in Hollywood-is a decent screenplay and a bearable score. To start with the latter, though scarcely lesser, evil: Hans Zimmer is the kind of vulgar hack who is limited to composing two sorts of music, the soupily derivative and the oafishly bloated. And-doubtless with the director, Michael Bay, urging him on-he never subsides. Even during the Japanese air-and-sea raid, the wretched music churns away in the background instead of just allowing the bombs and torpedoes, the aircraft and anti-aircraft guns their own awesome symphony of death and destruction, which can obliterate all except the one thing it ought to: the music of Hans Zimmer. Hard to tell which is deadlier: his minced Tchaikovsky or his homogenized Rachmaninov.

The screenplay by Randall Wallace-one of those that do not know the difference between lie and lay-gives us all the bromides of Forties war movies and Fifties tearjerkers, as enlisted men crack creaky jokes or face death with a cliche, and lovers exult in mushy embraces or tear up in a hail of platitudes sprinkled with cutesiness.

The love story concerns two bosom buddies, Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett), who already as small boys in Tennessee tried to fly a dust-cropper biplane, and by 1941 have grown into valiant army pilots. Lieutenant Rafe goes off to fight in the Eagle Squadron in the Battle of Britain, heavy-heartedly leaving behind Nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), whom he met cute as she was jabbing his behind with a giant hypodermic. Naturally, they have fallen madly in love, but off he goes to fly for the Brits, for which he has volunteered, though he tells his dear Danny, whom he always tries to protect, that he is under orders. Evelyn and Rafe exchange love letters aglow with commonplaces until he is shot down over the Channel and presumed dead. By that time, both Evelyn and Danny are stationed at Pearl Harbor, their hearts breaking in unison at the terrible news, and eventually seeking solace with each other.

Michael Bay sees to it that the triangular love story is cunningly crosscut with Japan's preparations for war and the United States' well- meaning but bumbling preparations for defense. We watch FDR (Jon Voight in elaborate but not wholly successful makeup) convoking the military top brass, with only one lowly officer (Dan Aykroyd) vainly proffering the right hunch. We see Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) and his staff, as well as the Japanese rank and file, getting sinisterly ready. There is an attempt at faintly humanizing the Yellow Peril, but such egalitarian impulses are restricted to a savvy minimum.

Then the sneak attack. All stops are pulled out, letting you see where every one of those millions of dollars went; yet the thing left me, if not exactly cold, only lukewarm. It feels more like a spectacular display of technique than a human tragedy; those bodies hurtling through the air look more like stuntmen than corpses; those frantic yet heroic nurses are too studiedly chosen types; those images of innocent civilians-woman hanging laundry, children playing ball-are too calculatedly culled. When Steven Spielberg did the Normandy invasion in Saving Private Ryan, you felt the horror as happening to you; in Michael Bay's hands, you remain a spectator.

Oh, the predictability of the love story! If you can't guess what will happen next, and can't foresee the final sequence in full detail, you deserve forfeiting a year's popcorn privileges, as well as receiving a hundred thwacks with a rolled-up fanzine. Which is not to say that the movie doesn't have some modest surprises, such as Admiral Yamamoto delivering the script's most philosophical pacifist line.

The acting is strictly standard issue. Ben Affleck's Rafe is the traditional big-brother hero, and Josh Hartnett's Danny the equally traditional kid brother he shields but cannot restrain. They are not actually brothers, which is just as well, else their love for each other, all but surpassing that for Evelyn, might seem incestuous. Pert Kate Beckinsale does a flawless American accent despite being British, but is otherwise competently unremarkable. Ditto Alec Baldwin as Colonel James Doolittle, who does little but display standard staunchness and tough love for his men. Jon Voight is a perfectly adequate stick-figure Roosevelt, and Cuba Gooding Jr., as the black Navy cook who turns antiaircraft-gunner hero (the historical Dorie Miller), doughtily fulfills the required minimum amount of enlightened multiracialism. As the fun-loving nurse Betty, James King (despite her name, a woman) contributes the prescribed dose of laughter turning into tears.