Pearl Harbor

This weekend's DVD was the, quite frankly abysmal Pearl Harbor.

But let's start with the positives - the sequence depicting the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is quite spectacular. It's also surprisingly effective at getting over the carnage and loss of life without being overly gory.

It is sensationalist, giving a slightly distorted sense that the Americans somehow won Pearl Harbor, despite actually being dealt a crushing blow - kinda like 'victory in defeat' if you will.

But then this is a Hollywood film - so much so that the 'Hollywoodness' is ultimately to the film's detriment.

It's an enormously long film at just over 3 hours. The reason for that is that it tries to take in a large arc. The actual attack doesn't happen until half way through, and the last segment is taken up by the Doolittle raid, which was sort of like a revenge attack on the Japanese mainland.

Now, taking in that big sweep you'd expect it to be trying to layer in lots of back-story or meaning to the attack. Looking at it from a cultural or political point of view.

Instead what we get is the most shoddy love-triangle in modern cinema history. You notice I used the word "modern" there - I did that for a very specific reason. the romance in the film almost comes across as a pastiche of 40s Hollywood films.

It's overwrought and melodramatic and it's way too 'perfect' - both in the sense that you've seen it all before and the dialogue has such a sheen to it that it almost gleams (presumably in that shinning, white-toothed glint of an all-American smile type fashion). It's so over-done that it's nauseating to watch.

And that's kinda true of the film as a whole - this is film-making with primary colours, not the subtle pastel shades of life itself.

The film is also woefully inaccurate. To some extent I can forgive them some things - a lot of the hardware shown in the film is more modern, for example, but then the majority of the kit has been decommissioned or is in museums. The only other option would have been to use 100% CG and that would probably have taken silly amounts of time and money.

No, the bad inaccuracies come more from the wilful disregard for simple things like facts. For example, there's a distinct air to the film that the majority of the senior characters either knew in general that an attack was coming or had information telling them Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked, but that incompetence of their superiors or public opinion somehow prevented them from taking action.

This is so grossly inaccurate it's almost offensive and represents both an abuse of artistic licence and a complete (and worrying) retelling of history.

The worst losers on this front are the Japanese. I mean, there's some token attempt to depict them as slightly reticent about going to war with American (bizarrely this in itself is actually inaccurate - part of Japan's problem was their total blindness to reality) but you really do feel this is a token effort. There's a great amount of time paid to the unconvincing American love triangle, but very little paid to the Japanese at all.

My recommendation would be to skip to the attack bit and just watch that. It may not be 100% accurate, but it's well done and gets some sort of point across.