“Like I see these people on the Internet
saying, ‘Oh, it’s a travesty that Michael Bay is doing this story.’ ‘Oh, why’s
he doing it?’ ‘Oh, he’s going to wreck it.’ It’s like shame on those people,
you know? Shame on them!” – Michael Bay
I have this sick fascination
with the Michael Bay movie Pearl Harbor
(2001). It is just so awful, but kind of mesmerizing in its awfulness. The
movie was his attempt to shift gears and show the world that he could do
something other than mindless action movies. With this movie, Bay, armed with
Randall Wallace’s subpar John Milius-esque screenplay, thought he could
replicate the formula of James Cameron’s Titanic
(1997) complete with Earth-shattering box returns. It was almost as if Bay
expected the Academy to park a truck up to his front door and dump a bunch of
awards on his doorstep because he was making an IMPORTANT MOVIE. One can almost
imagine him thinking to himself, “This will be the movie they’ll remember me
for,” with the same kind of hubris not seen since Charles Foster Kane thought
he could make the news he was supposed to be covering.
Only that didn’t happen. Pearl Harbor didn’t make Titanic-sized numbers at the box office
(although, $449 million worldwide ain’t bad), the critics hated it (let’s face
it, by this point his movies had become critic-proof as the film’s producer
Jerry Bruckheimer put it, “We made it for people, not critics.”) and it was
nominated for more Golden Raspberry Awards than Academy Awards. Although, to be
fair, it did win an Oscar for Best Sound Editing – hardly the dominance that
Cameron’s movie demonstrated the year it walked away with 11 Oscars. The
failure of Pearl Harbor was some kind
of reality check for Bay and he retreated back to familiar turf with Bad Boys II (2003) and is now the
caretaker of the Transformers
franchise.
Bay lays it on thick right
from the get-go as we watch two young boys play make believe they’re shooting
down German planes in their father’s old biplane, the sequence awash in the golden
hue of nostalgia as a crop duster flies overhead in slow motion while Hans
Zimmer’s wistful score swells. It’s Tennessee 1923 and Bay then flashes forward
to the best friends as aspiring hotshot fighter pilots in 1940, challenging
each other like some sort of prototypical Top
Gun (1986). One guy even says admiringly, “Those are some smooth aces,” and
manages to do so with a straight face. This is only the first of many howlers
courtesy of Wallace’s script.
Cut to Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) being chewed out by his superior, Major Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin)
for his screwball antics. Rafe is assigned to duty in England where World War
II is raging, much to the dismay of his best friend Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) who confronts him about it thus setting up the true romance of Pearl Harbor. No, it’s not the Hallmark
Movie on steroids love affair between Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale, but
Affleck and Josh Hartnett’s bromance. The scene depicting their tiff over Rafe
leaving is the first indication that these guys were cast for their looks and
not their acting, especially Hartnett who is borderline unwatchable at times.
It’s not what he says per se, but how he says it – so wooden – that is so bad.
The dialogue they’re forced to utter does them no favors.
The introduction of the
beautiful nurses that Rafe and his fellow pilots are destined to meet reminds
one that aside from choreographing explosions, Bay really knows how to
photograph women, bathing the likes of Beckinsale, Jennifer Garner and Sara Rue, among others, in warm, inviting light as they gush about the hunky pilots
they screened days ago. For whatever it’s worth they are all well cast and look
like they came from that time period.
Rafe and Evelyn’s (Kate
Beckinsale) meet-cute is largely played for laughs, both intentionally (he acts
like a clumsy fool) and unintentionally (the dialogue is howlingly bad). As the
scene dragged on I started to feel sorry for Affleck who not only has to try
and sell this clunky dialogue, but do it with a bandage on his nose and acting
like a child that needs to be taken care of, which is intended to be romantic,
but comes across as laughable and insulting. And this is supposed to be the
most romantic thing that has ever happened to Evelyn?! Dear Lord…
At first glance, the
attention to period detail looks convincing, but a significant portion of the
film’s Wikipedia page is spent pointing out the many historical inaccuracies,
which is surprising with a production that had that kind of budget you’d think
they’d have hired some decent technical advisors, but I can see Bay waving them
aside in favor of his version of this time period, historical accuracy be
damned! It’s Michael Bay’s version of the 1940s. Did he learn nothing from
Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979),
another notorious WWII big budget fiasco? At least Spielberg was trying to make
a comedy; Bay has no such excuse with the unintentional hilarity that ensues
between explosive action sequences.
Bay is on stronger ground
with his depiction of the plane battles where Rafe engages with German planes
over England. They are exciting and Bay does a nice job conveying the chaos of
aerial battle as planes dive and roll amidst machine gun fire. However, things
get complicated when Rafe apparently dies in battle and Danny and Evelyn wait
months to get cozy as they console each other. Danny is a little less awkward
in flirting with Evelyn than Rafe and Hartnett looks most comfortable in these
scenes as he lets his hunky good looks do all the heavy lifting.
Big surprise, Rafe isn’t dead
after all and shows up after Danny and Evelyn have consummated their
relationship in typical Bay fashion – slow motion amidst virginal white
parachutes. Awkward! Oh yeah, she’s pregnant with Danny’s baby. We have to
endure this mind-numbingly dull soap opera for over an hour intercut with
teases of the Japanese preparing for war while Dan Aykroyd’s Captain Thurman
tries to convince the military brass that Pearl Harbor would be a probable
target because it would devastate the Pacific fleet. Naturally, Danny and Rafe
settle their differences by kickstarting a bar brawl. Fortunately, the Japanese
sneak attack allows them to settle their differences fighting side-by-side.
“It’s like, people die all over the world in
earthquakes, whatever, you know, in much huger numbers than at Pearl Harbor.
But there was something; there’s something. You wonder, What is it?
You think, Okay, only three thousand people died, but there’s something, you
know?” – Michael Bay
About 86 minutes in and what
we’ve been waiting to see, or, as Martin Lawrence puts it in Bad Boys II, “This shit just got real,” as
Bay presents a chilling shot of low-flying Japanese fighter planes zooming by
two boys standing on a grassy field. He intercuts tons of planes advancing
while most of our heroes are asleep, blissfully unaware of what’s about to
happen. Not surprisingly, the best part of Pearl
Harbor is the actual attack on the place because it allows Bay to do what
he does best – blow shit up. Bay tries to replicate the shock and awe of the
first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan
(1998) with a visceral depiction of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He’s able to
use CGI to follow a Japanese bomb as it is launched from a plane and drops into
a battleship, which ends up taking you out of the picture as you marvel at the
stylish technique.
This sequence gives Bay a
chance to indulge in explosive mayhem (or Bayhem) and man, does he ever cut
loose. He makes sure we are thrown right into the middle of the action. There
are some truly unsettling shots, like an ominous one of a Japanese torpedo
traveling underwater and we can see the legs of countless men treading water
above. That being said, it’s hard not get caught up in the carnage as we see
scores of innocent sailors get blown and shot up. Not to mention, as badly as
they are written, we care a little bit about what happens to Rafe and Evelyn
and their friends. And yet, Bay can’t resist sticking blatant jingoistic images
like the shot of American flag submerged underwater alongside men trying to
stay alive.
He also can’t resist shooting
the aftermath of the attack stylishly, smudging the lens with a Vaseline
effect, distorting it so as to avoid an R rating with all the bloody
casualties. There is the occasional odd shot, like a group of shambling burn
victims framed like something out of George Romero zombie movie. Rafe and Danny
help rescue men trapped in damaged ships and Bay frames Hartnett in a glamour
shot, his hair stylishly mussed up, which feels sneakily exploitative and
cheapens the pain and suffering around him.
Historical figures like
President Roosevelt (Jon Voight) are reduced to caricatures and in what is
meant to be a dramatic moment, but comes off as unintentionally ridiculous, he
rises out of his wheelchair to make a point about the resilience of the human spirit.
This gesture instead invokes a similar moment, although played for laughs, in
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The last third of the
movie features Alec Baldwin at his most Baldwin-iest as he barks out orders and
makes inspirational speeches almost recalling his arrogant motivator of men
from Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). The
actor does his best to make his cliché-ridden, rah-rah dialogue sound
half-decent through sheer force of will, but it isn’t easy.
Pearl Harbor might have been a passable movie if it had ended after the attack
but no, we’ve got to end things on a feel-good high and so there is the tacked
on Doolittle Raid, which transforms Pearl
Harbor into a revenge movie. You can almost imagine Bay or Jerry
Bruckheimer brainstorming ideas – how can we give Pearl Harbor a happy ending?
The Doolittle Raid also seems to be included as a way to punish Danny for
stepping out with Evelyn behind his best friend’s back. And so Danny gets to
die a noble death while Rafe ends up with Evelyn to raise the dead man’s child.
Pearl Harbor attracted a large number of young actors into its vortex with the
likes of Jennifer Garner, Sara Rue, Jaime King, and Michael Shannon who I’m
sure their agents all told them to do the movie as it would be a big boost to
their careers. There’s also a few dependable veteran character actors, most
notably Tom Sizemore, who brings a much-needed gritty charisma that fresh-faced
pretty boys like Affleck and Hartnett can’t.
When my wife and I saw Pearl Harbor in a theater – like many we
are suckered by the rather solemn, impressive-looking trailers – three-quarters
of the way through she felt a rat brush by her foot. We realized that maybe we
weren’t the key demographic for this movie and the presence of rats was a sign.
We beat a hasty retreat and upon leaving the theater demanded our money back.
We met an usher on a butt break who asked us what we thought of the movie. We
told him of our woes and asked him how it ended and he bemusedly recounted the
Doolittle Raid and the fates of Rafe and Danny. He did a better job of telling
the story than Bay!
Pearl Harbor may feature the most harrowing depiction of the battle on film, but
surrounds it on both sides with instantly forgettable filler. It has an odd
place in Bay’s wrongraphy. It is the director at his most restrained with some
shots lasting at least a couple of seconds before an edit (that’s a snail’s
pace for him). It’s not that Bay made a movie about Pearl Harbor, but that he
did a bad one. Shame on him! Instead
of becoming a chapter of history like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 that we will always
remember, Bay’s movie belongs to a chapter of cinematic history we’d like to
forget. One good thing came out of this recent experience of watching Pearl Harbor – it finally sated my
curious, morbid fascination with it. I don’t feel the need to every watch it
again.
SOURCES
Jones, Kent. "Bay Watch." Film Comment. July/August 2001.
Laskas, Jeanne Marie. "The Life of Michael Bay." Esquire. July 2001.