Pearl Harbor – 2001
This was a pretty awful movie, but thank goodness the special effects were fantastic. We all know Michael Bay is known for big-budget action movies with lots of stuff blowing up, but here was a project that was perfect for his direction. The problem was that about two thirds of the film was full of stupid dialogue and bad acting. But the scene of the bombing of Pearl Harbor was phenomenal, and really, isn’t that what we all we came to see, anyway?
Yes, there were a couple of other war scenes that were pretty exciting to watch, like a couple of RAF dogfights in European territory, and after the forty-five minute Pearl Harbor sequence, there was the U.S. response, the bombing of Tokyo. These scenes were just as well crafted, as long as you throw out the Ben Affleck is the ultimate action hero angle, for which the actor isn’t wholly to blame. There were plenty of explosions and gunfire, enough to put any 1940s war propaganda film to shame. The action was exciting and realistic, and I really enjoyed watching it.
The bombing scene was mostly, though not completely, historically accurate in regards to what ships were destroyed, and in what manner. The explosions and mayhem were fantastic! And to make it all the more accurate, the filming took place on location in Hawaii. However, just to be clear, the iconic shot which followed the bomb from the Japanese fighter plane to the Arizona, while it was an awesome shot, might or might not be accurate. In the film, the bomb penetrated four decks down, into the vessel’s forward section where their main armaments were kept. When the bomb detonated, the massive explosion tore the ship in half.
One of the most impressive effects was the capsizing of the Oklahoma. Apparently, they only built a recreation of the front end of the battleship, the rest of the vessel being created digitally. It was an incredible and memorable shot, with sailors sliding off the deck into the water. After that, more Japanese planes flew over, flying in low and shooting the men in the water. I have to be impressed with the massive scale of the film’s visuals and the and the amazing choreography involved.
But there was so much more to the scene. We saw the Japanese forces flying all over the island, shooting down civilians and destroying airfields covered with grounded American planes. There was the aerial battle between the Japanese and the two Americans that managed to get off the ground, though in reality there were five American airplanes that took to the air and gave battle. A few of the silly antics in the air, like when Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnet tricked Japanese fighters into crashing into each other, made me roll my eyes a little. But for the most part everything was done pretty well. Now if we could just cut out the boo-yah dialogue and the poor acting from the lead actors… and the unnecessary love story, the movie could have been a whole lot better.