Film review: Pearl Harbor (2001), directed by Michael Bay
Captains Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) have been best friends since childhood. They go to war together, become fancy air force pilots. Rafe falls in love with a nurse, Lieutenant Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), but he’s quickly shipped off to Europe to actually fight. His plane is shot down, and he’s presumed dead.
Woe are Evelyn and Danny. For a few months. Then, they seek each other’s support, and fall in love. What happens? Rafe returns – he wasn’t dead at all, he had been held up in France. Uh-oh. And to top it all off, the Japanese invade Pearl Harbor, and shit kicks off. Because this film was directed by the Transformers franchise’s Michael Bay (!), there are lots and lots of big explosions for about an hour, before the guys fly off to be Big Damn All-American Heroes.
Pearl Harbor has a big cast of familiar faces. For instance, amongst the military men, we see Alec Baldwin, Ewen Bremner, Cuba Gooding Jr, Michael Shannon, Colm Feore, Peter Firth (yes, Harry Pearce!!), Daniel Mays, Tomas Arana and Dan Aykroyd.The nurses aren’t exactly unfamiliar either – they include Jennifer Garner and Sara Rue. Jon Voight is president Roosevelt. Phew!
Michael Bay doing a romance film? Surely not! Yeah, my reaction when seeing who directed this film was one of total surprise. But, then again, there’s about an hour’s worth of explosions crammed in there to make up for it. And that’s part of the problem. Pearl Harbor is over three hours long. It could have been cut down quite a bit. Luckily, though, the explosions could mostly be fast-forwarded through. They were big and explosive and went on for far too long so instead of being gripped by the loss of life it was simply a way to show off pyrotechnics and/or CGI.
Let’s see what the Team America guys had to say about it:
I miss you more then Michael Bay missed the mark
When he made Pearl Harbor
I miss you more than that movie missed the point
And that’s an awful lot girl
And now, now you’ve gone away
And all I’m trying to say is
Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you
This is true. Was it a love story or was it a war movie? A love triangle or explosive action flick?
I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school
He was terrible in that film
I need you like Cuba Gooding needed a bigger part
He’s way better than Ben Affleck
And now all I can think about is your smile
and that shitty movie too
Pearl Harbor sucked and I miss you
Yes! Cuba Gooding and Ben Affleck should’ve swapped parts, that would have been a vast improvement.
Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?
I guess Pearl Harbor sucked
Just a little bit more than I miss you
Because he’s very good at big explosions, that’s why. But when one third of a very long film are made up of explosives and the other two thirds are a drawn-out and not very engaging love story, it doesn’t become terribly interesting. And it should have been. They had a chance to make something poignant about a tragic incident, and instead they make … this.
But it’s not bad bad. I mean, there’s flying in it, and guys in uniforms. But it’s too long and so choc-a-bloc with Brits for something so fundamentally American that it becomes a little bit peculiar to watch. And that’s even without taking into account how many people died in the attack that gets lost in the Bay explosion porn. It’s so wide off the mark it should have sunk somewhere in the Pacific.
2.8 out of 5 air plane hangers. And here’s the song, for reference.