PEARL HARBOR
Starring:
Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding Jr.
and John Voight
Director: Michael Bay
Running Time: 183 mins
Certificate: 12A
Available now on DVD, Special edition available November 11th
Rafe (Affleck) and Danny (Hartnett) were life long friends who had always loved the sky. Joining the Air Force as soon as they where able, the two where posted under aviation hero General Doolittle (Baldwin). Here, Rafe meets and falls in love with Evelyn (Beckinsale), a nurse at the local military hospital. Things change however, when Rafe volunteers to fly with the British against the Germans in Europe and Danny and Evelyn are assigned to the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. When they receive word of Rafe untimely death, both Danny and Evelyn are inconsolable. Three months after the tragic event, the grieving pair meet accidentally and start to become very close. Their newfound love is shattered by the return of Rafe, who had been recovering from his crash in Northern France. As these events unfold, the Japanese are planning to bring the American Pacific defences to its knees, by destroying the fleet at Pearl Harbor.
After James Cameron set a love story against a dramatic historical event, I’ve been waiting for the next person to try and recreate the Oscar triumph of Titanic. Step forward producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Better known for his plot deficient, big summer blockbusters like Armageddon, Con Air and The Rock, he probably saw this as his big chance for Oscar recognition. Does he succeed, well the answer is no. The movie is just far too long, with a two inconsequential hours bolted on to each end of what is truly the most dramatic depiction of war since Saving Private Ryan.
In the first hour, you are just longing for the battle to start and for the last hour you’re wondering how much more they can drag out of the subject matter. The assault on Pearl Harbor should have been the dramatic conclusion to the movie, not the second act, as the other two thirds of the movie are filled with trivial characters that you never really gain any affinity for and the whole love triangle plot is something you’d expect to see on a soap opera. Affleck just looks like he is on cruise control and Hartnett is never given enough to really challenge his craft, only Beckinsale shines, showing that she has the beauty and the acting talent to become a leading lady.
The special effects are the real star of the movie however. They are truly astonishing, as you can never tell which shots are CGI and which are real. The whole main battle is shot with both graphic realism and astounding visual flair by director Michael Bay, who handles the whole sequence with dignity and respect for those who lost their lives.
So should you go and see it? Well it is definitely a big screen movie, as the battle sequence would lose a lot of its dramatic impact on a television, but it all depends if you have the patience and the willing to sit in the cinema for over three hours, when your brain is only really stimulated for forty-five minutes, but what a forty-five minutes.
2 Disk Version
Introduction by director Michael Bay, Documentary on Pearl Harbor Veterans Returning to the USS Arizona Memorial, Documentary on the Real Attack, Documentary on the Unsung Heroes, Faith Hill's Music Video "There You'll Be" & Cast Interviews
Special Edition
Extended 4 hour version of the movie, Actor's boot camp, The Surprise Attack - multi-angle feature, Mutiple 'making of' featurettes, 'Unsung Heroes' historical documentary, 'One Hour Over Tokyo' Super-8 footage montage, Animatic scene concepts from Michael Bay, Audio commentaries, Interactive historical timeline, DVD-ROM feature 'Definitive Bibliography', Faith Hill music video, Theatrical teaser and trailer
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