Pearl Harbor Doesn't Suck, but Its Marketing Strategy Is More Exciting than the Movie Itself

The media has an eating disorder, a binge-purge illness that recurs twice a year: winter and summer. In the months leading up to these financially crucial moviegoing seasons, America's media outlets binge on "news" about upcoming blockbusters. They feast most luxuriously on so-called "event" films that are presumed to have some kind of social resonance (Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, Pearl Harbor) or pop culture fascination (Jurassic Park, The Last Action Hero, The Phantom Menace). The reporters describe every detail of how these films were created?the assembly of the cast, the cajoling of a particular star, the behind-the-scenes struggle to raise the enormous budget, the painstaking design of the sets or special effects or whatever. These stories are typically done without the writer or correspondent having actually seen the finished film, or even a rough cut; often the studio will permit journalists only to see a scene or two, or perhaps a trailer, or to read a bit of the script if the storyline isn't hush-hush.

It's hard to imagine, say, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal or Forbes expending enormous numbers of column inches getting readers excited about the production of, say, a new car or a new computer, without suggesting whether the product is worthy of interest apart from the fact that a lot of people are spending money to create it. Yet that's the nature of big-budget movie coverage in America, where the press has allowed itself to be co-opted by the studios, essentially becoming an arm of the studios' marketing departments. Entertainment is the only branch of journalism where reporters, editors and readers are used to taking power at its word. It lacks skepticism, except for the predictable Entertainment Weekly brand of skepticism that asks, parenthetically, "Will it make money?" or "Will it redefine the career of this actor or that director?" Even mainstream coverage of the police and the military, two areas often shrouded in paternalistic secrecy, has been known to question the official version of things from time to time, yet the feeling among America's tv news producers and newspaper and magazine editors seems to be: "Well, the studio, and by extension Hollywood, has decided that certain movies are the big movies, by virtue of being expensive or controversial or 'important.' Far be it from us to deny them free advertising."

And what of film critics?the purge half of the binge-purge cycle? Glad you asked. Except for Ebert and Roeper and their mostly irrelevant, soundbite-delivering local news clones (when you get one minute to review something, no matter what your opinion of the movie, you are basically a Hollywood publicist), there are no film critics on television. And at magazines and newspapers, critics are often put in the peculiar position of having to react against their own colleagues' shameless Hollywood cheerleading; this often means redirecting one's anger at media whorishness into a review of the movie that inspired that whorishness. (Yes, I'm doing a version of that in this review; fortunately, New York Press has no full-time entertainment reporters to slight.)

The defensive derision of many critics who write about seasonal blockbusters probably stems from the fact that they're paid to be independent thinkers (or to pretend to be independent thinkers). As the big moviegoing seasons approach, and critics are saturation-bombed by coverage of, say, The Phantom Menace or Titanic or Pearl Harbor, they dig in their heels and think, "This movie had better be amazing, because if it isn't, I'm gonna take it apart." Panning the hell out of a big, expensive movie a couple of times a year reassures the critic that he's not glued to Hollywood's nipple like a lot of the so-called "entertainment reporters"?many of whom work for the same publication as the critic. Result: certain overhyped movies end up being treated too harshly (Ishtar and Hudson Hawk are actually rather funny; The Phantom Menace was a mess, but enjoyable for Star Wars fans). Other such movies end up being overpraised (Titanic comes to mind). Either way, reviews of seasonal blockbusters invariably react to both the film and its hype. This isn't fair to the filmmakers, but given the media environment in which modern movies are produced and released, it cannot be any other way. In the end, though, reviews of these sorts of movies don't really affect their box-office success. In the neverending Cold War between studios and critics, reviews amount to pathetic symbolic gestures?pistol shots fired long after the invaders' tanks have rolled down Main St.

All of which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Pearl Harbor, a massively expensive, "important" Hollywood movie that's been promoted out the yin-yang since the beginning of the year, and is now being characterized by many critics as a bomb, a stinker, a $135-million financial sinkhole for releasing company Disney. The critical reaction strikes me as overstated?another example of critics realizing they can't punish their own employers and colleagues for whorishness and deciding to punish the film instead.

Pearl Harbor is not as awful as early word suggests. Unfortunately, it's not very good, either. As a logistical feat, it's impressive and somewhat compelling; if you came across it on cable late at night, you might watch the whole thing, muttering the entire time about how it's not that good and how you really ought to turn it off and go to bed. It's more a triumph of technology than storytelling; like many blockbusters of the digital era, it seems to exist mainly to redo something you've seen before with computer-generated effects. In that sense, it owes more to Jurassic Park (digital dinosaurs) and Twister (digital tornadoes) than to more serious historical epics.

Much of the advance publicity has focused on director Michael Bay's meticulous recreation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurs an hour and 40 minutes into the picture's three-hour running time. The attack itself is certainly spectacular; it's also more attentive to spatial geography than anything else Bay has directed, perhaps because digital effects people prefer longer takes with lots of movement, the better to showcase the tactile realism of their creations. If the attack sequence were cut out of the film and repackaged as an IMAX featurette, it'd be a minor sensation; unfortunately, here it amounts to a tasty slice of technological meat between fat pieces of dramatic whitebread. Anything in Pearl Harbor that isn't a big action setpiece feels glossy and flat, like one of those Super Bowl commercials that temporarily fools you into thinking it's a trailer for a movie until chop-chop editing and superslick photography reveal its true nature.

And what of the characters? Well, there aren't any characters to speak of; they're all variations on the Hero, the Best Friend, the Girl, the Growly Boss, etc. Ben Affleck stars as Rafe McCawley, a Tennessee-born maverick pilot reminiscent of, well, Maverick, the pilot played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Early on, there's even a scene where Rafe and his childhood buddy, Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), play chicken with planes within spitting distance of a flight control tower, and are reprimanded for their recklessness by real-life Col. James Dolittle (Alec Baldwin). Since the Top Gun academy hasn't been invented yet, Dolittle can't send these two meatheads there, so he sends Danny to Pearl Harbor and Rafe to Britain, where he flies against the Germans in the Royal Air Force.

A curiously disjointed early flashback sets up the film's central love triangle: A lovely Navy nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), fell in love with Rafe during a night on the town in New York. Later, when Evelyn is stationed in Pearl Harbor, she's wooed by Danny. When Rafe is shot down in Europe and presumed dead, Evelyn and Danny enter into an affair. Following Rafe's 45-minute absence from the movie?an absence that raises the question of how stupid the filmmakers think audiences are, considering Affleck is the movie's top-billed male lead?the square-jawed, All-American flyboy makes his triumphant return, throwing a wrench into Evelyn's new love life. At which point the forces of Emperor Hirohito rain hellfire on Hawaii.

I couldn't help thinking that From Here to Eternity was ending right around the time that Pearl Harbor was getting into gear. Still, Bay comes up with a few resonant visuals (underwater images of Japanese torpedoes whizzing past the kicking legs of sailors; a scene after the attack where the heroes donate blood to the wounded and it has to be stored in empty Coke bottles). Though the younger performers all have a mannequin-like blankness, the older actors come off well. I was especially fond of Jon Voight as FDR, a tough old SOB who hauls himself up out of his own wheelchair to berate generals who think the war can't be won; Cuba Gooding Jr., who brings dignity and anger to his insultingly tiny role as Dorie Miller, the real-life Navy cook who gunned down two Zeros; and Baldwin, whose tough, centered performance actually seems to come out of an old movie, as opposed to Affleck's, which, while appealing, is just an approximation.

Stray moments are entertaining, even rousing. Randall Wallace's screenplay has awful B-movie dialogue ("Mr. President, I think we've come up with an idea of how to bomb the Japanese!"). But it wisely understands that war is all about the primal desire for payback, and illustrates that desire with Dolittle's climactic raid on Tokyo. Unfortunately, it's not easy to appreciate what's good about the movie because Michael Bay's relentless action-film directing style pitches the whole story at the same emotional level. Like Bay's The Rock and Armageddon, Pearl Harbor often feels less like a movie than like three hours' worth of trailers strung end-to-end. Whether you're seeing a comic-romantic courtship scene or the recreation of the sinking of the U.S.S. Arizona, minute for minute Bay seems so determined to impress us with the film's hugeness that even charitable viewers may feel cut off from the human story. (The script's sanitized, PG-13 vision of youth in the 40s runs counter to the grotty realism of Ryan and The Thin Red Line, and even the sexy, adult From Here to Eternity; nobody smokes, few people curse and racial slurs are virtually nonexistent.)

Pearl Harbor is the kind of movie that so overwhelms you with scale (and volume) that you can't help being somewhat interested in what's happening onscreen even though you know you're looking at a glossy, secondhand vision of both American history and old movies. With its unwieldy mix of awesome physical detail and soap opera melodrama, the film aims to fuse Saving Private Ryan and Titanic, but it lacks the sociological vastness of the former and the shameless teenage romanticism of the latter. And yes, it's one of those movies whose marketing strategy is ultimately more exciting and intriguing than the movie itself. The hyping of Pearl Harbor concentrated on its importance; the movie itself settles for scale. And in a time when every summer blockbuster boasts its own variety of hugeness, scale is not enough.