At its base, “Pearl Harbor” is a love triangle, and Bay sets up the characters early. We’re introduced to Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck), a slow boy who can’t read that well, and his best friend Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) who looks out for him, helping him with schooling while learning the art of flying from Rafe, who seems to excel at the enterprise despite his disability. We see some early scenes of their childhood, and the pre-World War II arena they grew up in. In one scene as Danny’s dad calls Rafe slow, Rafe accuses him of being a German and we see the hurt and post traumatic stress as Danny’s dad tells him he fought German’s in the trenches. Of course the father is played by “Armageddon” alum William Fitchner, who instills the right amount of fatherly protection and simple-mindedness required of the character.
The plot becomes complicated when a) Rafe and Danny, who have joined the Army Air Corps, find out that their company is being stationed in fated Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and b) when Rafe meets a beautiful woman (Kate Beckinsale), whom he quickly falls in love with.
What works about “Pearl Harbor” is the attention to detail of the times that Bay instills in it, something not hinted at in the director’s previous work. The movie, filmed mostly in California and Hawaii, accurately recreates the late 1930s time period in setting, feel, and design. Dated cars line its streets, its wardrobes consisting of uniforms and frilly dresses and, under it all, an innocent naivety that flies in the face of the tragedy that was about to befall the Hawaiian port. Rafe and Evelyn (Beckinsale) trade romantic promises in a scene next to the Queen Mary that betrays the seriousness of the moments to come. Plot dictates that a separation will occur when Rafe is sent to London to help fight the Nazi threat. And while Danny and Evelyn come together and have a bit of a thing, since this takes up a good portion of the film, direct spoilers will not be given.
As a romance, “Pearl Harbor” works well, giving audiences connection to the characters (who are all sympathetic), even if it does thrown in some melodrama with an inevitable feud between Rafe and Danny that the plot demands. Affleck, who played a similar character in “Armageddon” is mildly constrained here to playing a hotshot pilot one minute and a heartthrob another; but the effect comes off less insulting than it could have, a credit to Affleck’s earnest performance. Hartnett is likewise playing a character we’ve seen before as he moves within his boy-next-door archetype throughout. But both he and Affleck make believable friends, and their scenes together are authentic and real. Adding Beckinsale to the mix only helps: she comes off sweet, charming, and real, especially during the film’s darker moments that task her with caring about both of these men while treating legions of wounded soldiers in the hospital’s ill-prepared infirmary.
While the opening stretches of the film are slow and steady, the battle sequence, where Japan attacks the Pacific Fleet, are taught and suspenseful. And graphic. Some of the scenes may be intense for some, as a full thirty minutes of footage is set aside to detail the bombing of the American fleet. This is of course sandwiched in-between some melodrama with the aforementioned love triangle, as well as war sequences involving General Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) and President Roosevelt (an authentic and believable Jon Voight, who belonged in a more serious movie on the topic). Bay, while guilty of some of his standard filmmaking tropes, adequately portrays the tragedy as just that; although some of it is kept on the surface in lieu of the action movie he is desperate to not let slip through his grasps. As Rafe and Danny engage in high flying acrobatics and take down some enemy planes, one wonders if Bay wants us to be impressed with this or saddened. Answers aren’t forthcoming.
Of course, again without spoilers, the film culminates in a representation of the historic “Doolittle Raid” where American fighters would practice to take bombers off an aircraft carrier on a suicide mission in a retaliation effort against the Japanese. While the scene is suspenseful and sometimes moving, one can see where history begins to break down as key characters in Bay’s love triangle take precedence over authenticity. And while Baldwin, Affleck, and Hartnett are all gifted actors, here they become part of something that feels move like convention than inspiration, and the end of the movie – which is mostly obvious from the word go, feels like it takes front seat, with the historical tragedy of Pearl Harbor following behind when in reality it deserved the front and center.
At the end of the day, “Pearl Harbor” isn’t an awful movie, though it suffers from some uninspired and hackneyed moments. It brings you back to the 1940s, paints its characters with sympathy, and, although melodramatic, doesn’t sell its drama for effect more than needed. A more toned-down film, one that focused more on the war and less on the romance, may have been what this story needed. But it did gross nearly $200 million, so take that criticism as you see fit.
– by Mark Ziobro
