I’ve started this review five times now, trying to find just the right words to explain to you, reasonably and rationally, why I didn’t like Pearl Harbor.
On this, my sixth attempt, I have decided to admit to you that I just can’t do it. I can’t think really hard and summon up the airy-fairy tree-huggyness that allowed me to forgive The Mummy Returns for all its many, many sins. I can’t reach back into my university days to conjure up a thesis to explain away even the slightest weaknesses of Pearl Harbor, the way I managed to do for A Knight’s Tale. I can’t even rely on my own brain to shut down when I’m exposed to such unrepentantly stupid film making as Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay have managed to create in their long, spotty careers.
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| “Hi, I’m Tom Sizemore. Sure, I may be laughing now, but that’s because I’m guaranteed a role in every Hollywood WWII movie from now until my death. And why? Because you’ll never find another man more qualified to shout things like ‘Clear those murder holes!‘ and ‘Grab the .50!‘ anywhere. Shit, I sometimes I scream things like that at my wife, just to stay in practice.” |
Scott and I went to see Pearl Harbor together, thinking that we might be able to somehow diffuse any pain that it would inflict upon us individually by presenting a united front; little did we realize that Michael Bay had somehow managed to prepare for any such tactics by doubling the length of the film before he even made it. Pearl Harbor was, at the very best, a seventy-five to ninety-minute movie. The only possible explanation for its bloating out to something in excess of three hours is that Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer realized that, properly edited, Pearl Harbor might only inflict as much psychic harm upon the audience as a full punch to the face from the Incredible Hulk. At full-length, it’s more like a flying, atomic repeating double-axe-handle from the Incredible Hulk, right after Wolverine pulls your underwear up over your head while he talks about his personal problems.
I suspect very truly that the film is so long because it really wants to be several films, and spends a great deal of time making up its mind on exactly which movie it wants to be. During one of the nearly endless scenes between Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale, in which Ben Affleck discusses at great lengths how good it feels to be in love with Kate Beckinsale, and Kate Beckinsale reciprocates her feelings at even greater lengths, setting up Ben Affleck to summarize their passion at the greatest length of all, I began to imagine what could possibly be worse than being in the audience at that moment.
Amazingly, right up there with being dropped into a nuclear reactor and (rather than being mutated into a powerful force for Justice) being mutated into a pile of cinders or having my skull forcibly removed from my head while I’m alive, was being the screenwriter for Pearl Harbor. Because every now and again, there are quick little moments that betray how this movie might have been meant as something altogether different, before it had four or five other movies grafted over it.
Michael Bay: We’ve invited you here today to speak with you about your script for Pearl Harbor.
Jerry Bruckheimer: We’ve decided to do it.
Writer: That’s great! You won’t regret it! This is going to be great — I’m really excited about it. You know, now that Saving Private Ryan has kind of opened the door for Second World War movies again, I think we could do a lot to commemorate our role in the war. You know, I spent over one hundred thousand hours in research to perfect every aspect of this first draft.
Jerry Bruckheimer: Yeah, that’s great. Because the audience wants to pay ten bucks to see research.
Writer: Yeah, I think they’ll really appreciate the– wait, what?
Michael Bay: I think what Jerry’s trying to say here is that, while we like the general idea of a movie about Pearl Harbor, we feel there are some weak points in the script. We’ve both read it over and we don’t feel like there’s really enough to feel good about.
Writer: But… it’s Pearl Harbor. It’s one of the darkest chapters in twentieth-century American history.
Jerry Bruckheimer: Exactly our point. Who wants to pay a bunch of money just to get all depressed? Bad enough we’ve had to sit through all these movies how badly we fucked up Vietnam. We hardly need movies about how we fucked up World War II on top of them.
Writer: But we did fuck up–
Michael Bay: Now, let’s not get into a big hooplah about who fucked up where. All we’re saying is that we feel as though the script could use a little… punching up.
Jerry Bruckheimer: And tits.
Writer: Huh?
Jerry Bruckheimer: Listen, egghead — if James Cameron can get away with putting Kate Winslet’s tits up there on the screen and calling it “history,” then I sure as hell can.
Writer: How am I supposed to write breasts into the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor? What do they have to do with anything?
Michael Bay: All right, maybe the breasts are a stretch–
Jerry Bruckheimer: Goddamn it.
Michael Bay: –but we’ll at least need some attractive women. Men like to see women in action movies. It reminds them what they’d be fighting for, if somehow they were up there on the screen.
Writer: But I thought this’d be more of a war movie than an action movie…
Jerry Bruckheimer: And I thought of killing you, sawing you into seventeen pieces and feeding you to my dobermans after I steal your script, egghead, but we don’t all get what we wish for.
Michael Bay: In other words, we’re looking to appeal to a broader demographic than a war movie might attract. But don’t worry, we’re not thinking of an action movie, so much as a romantic-action-war thriller.
Writer: Is this a joke?
Michael Bay: We’re thinking Titanic meets Tora! Tora! Tora! meets Top Gun.
Jerry Bruckheimer: There are going to be plenty of action movies out this summer, but we want to be the one that’s different. We want women to see it, too.
Writer: Oh, no.
Michael Bay: That’s why we’re hoping to see the love story in your script become a little more developed.
Writer: But there isn’t a love story in my script. The closest thing to a love story is when the main character walks past someone writing letters home to his girlfriend.
Jerry Bruckheimer: And that’s when every bitch in the audience thinks, That guy is soooooo romantic! I wish the movie was about him! And when dating couples go to the movies, it’s usually the bitch who gets to choose what they see.
Writer: I try to avoid referring to my wife as a bitch.
Michael Bay: Now, let’s try to avoid splitting hairs, here. The point is–
Writer: I hardly think I’m splitting hairs.
“Hi, I’m Alec Baldwin. I’ve got a real fondness for the 1940’s in general, because that’s when many of the moons that’ve been pulled into orbit around my gigantic pot belly were first discovered.” Michael Bay: The point is that we’re looking to develop that character of the pilot writing home to his girlfriend and explore him a little more. Who’s he writing to? Why is he so much in love with her? Does he have a friend back home who’s waiting to have sex with this woman, if he’s ever shot down and presumed dead? Surely there’s no harm in expanding this subplot a little.
Writer: I… guess.
Jerry Bruckheimer: And, say, if we were to expand it out so that basically the entire movie is occupied by that subplot, then so much the better.
Michael Bay: Exactly! It’s win-win-win! The guys get an exciting movie about one of America’s finest moments, the ladies get a thrilling romance, and we’ve got a blockbuster on our hands!
Writer: What about the actual battle of Pearl Harbor?
Michael Bay: Oh, we had the special effects guys do that whole sequence about a month ago.
Jerry Bruckheimer: Which reminds me — you’d better find a way to write a black guy into the movie somewhere, okay? We couldn’t find Ben Affleck anywhere so we had to get Cuba Gooding Jr. to stand in.
Writer: I might as well burn my draft of the script right now, hadn’t I?
Michael Bay: We’re way ahead of you on that one, too.
Pearl Harbor, now showing at a theatre near you. Don’t even approach this movie with the expectation that your sense of irony is going to protect you, because it isn’t — the sheer, buffeting force of its stupidity is going to wash that cynical smile right off of your face and leave you scrambling to watch as many episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 as you can to restore your sarcasm. You might start out by laughing at it, but by the second hour you’re going to find yourself laughing at everything, and by the time any actual bombs fall on Pearl Harbor, you’ll be curled up in a little ball on the floor, permanently adhered there by the spilled cola of a thousand traumatized movie watchers.
Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer hate you, and Pearl Harbor is their revenge.