To see P.H. myself I'll either have to wait for 2nd-run and drive 90 miles to Mike B's theatre in Forsyth MT or hang on for DVD release which; if it's this bad, may come in less than 6 months + PPV on satellite.

A Tora! Tora! Tora! it ain't, apparently and thus TTT will remain the definitive historical movie of 12/7/1941.

Here goes:

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Snore-a! Snore-a! Snore-a!
Shallow ‘Pearl Harbor’ Is a Comic-Book Bomb

By JOE MORGENSTERN

“Pearl Harbor” is a blockheaded, hollow-hearted industrial enterprise that rises to its subject’s solemn grandeur only once, as a single bomb falls. The camera spots the bomb, a sleek, shiny thing with red paint on its nose, at the moment it’s released from a Japanese plane, and follows it down and down to the deck of the USS Arizona, then through the deck and deep into the battleship’s volatile innards. A heartbeat later, the Arizona thrusts up from the water orgasmically, a fireball erupts, and the gray leviathan blasts itself asunder. That’s the high point of a spectacular 40-minute segment given over, in the middle of the film, to the sneak attack. The other 133 minutes are littered with low points -- lame comedy, dubious history, fumbling drama and a love story so inept as to make a pacifist long for war.

The Japanese, we are told, were concerned that their torpedoes wouldn’t work in Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters. They fixed the problem with special wooden fins, but there’s no fix for the shallow approach of the movie’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, and its director, Michael Bay, to a defining moment in American history. This is the creative team that gave us the comic-book heroics and video-game bedazzlements of “Armageddon,” an aggressively dumb -- and hugely successful -- account of Earth’s efforts to dodge an asteroid the size of Texas. They’ve delivered more of the same in “Pearl Harbor,” declarations of earnest purpose notwithstanding, and the combination of poundingly effective action (brilliantly photographed by John Schwartzman), a resonant theme and a planet-size marketing machine makes a similar box-office success seem likely. The marketing people have even managed to hijack the 60th anniversary of the attack. Instead of waiting until Dec. 7 to memorialize the actual event, an eager nation has been psyched to salute the movie’s opening on Memorial Weekend.

Still, Messrs. Bruckheimer and Bay haven’t found enough substance to fill a conventional action adventure, let alone the laggardly saga they’ve stitched together from bits and pieces of old war movies and clumsily recycled romantic cliches. (Randall Wallace gets sole credit for the decrepit, self-ironic script.) Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett play the Army Air Corps flyboys Rafe and Danny. Best friends since childhood, they take turns falling in love with the same Navy nurse, Evelyn, who’s played by Kate Beckinsale. Rafe’s turn comes first, since he has jumped the gun on America’s entry into the war by signing up to fly Spitfires for the Royal Air Force. (The English scenes look as perfunctory as they feel.)

Before Rafe ships out, he and Evelyn spend a romantic night on the town in New York, a night that includes a crudely staged and strangely abortive effort to sneak aboard the Queen Mary. This time-filler is followed by a steamy farewell scene at Grand Central Station, where locomotives provide the steam and where the director prods his actors to an elephantine emotionalism that makes genuine intimacy impossible. Why was the scene shot at Union Station in Los Angeles? And, more to the point, why does Rafe ship out to England by train? Only the director and his producer know.

While Rafe fights the Battle of Britain, Evelyn pines for him half a world away in idyllic Hawaii. It’s a white idyll in which no Hawaiians are visible; the one possible candidate is described in the credits as a Samoan bouncer. It is also, of course, a doomed idyll. The Japanese have decided to attack because, as the movie has a mouthpiece in Tokyo explain, America has cut off Japan’s supply of oil and the island nation’s reserves will last only 18 months. While this is accurate, as far as it goes, the embargo was prompted by a decade of Japan’s unspeakable -- and unmentioned -- depredations throughout Asia. History is one thing but commerce is another, so Disney has blithely ignored the brutal past to sell tickets in Japan in the prosperous present.

In advance of the attack, there’s still time for Rafe, back in Europe, to crash into the sea; for Mr. Bay to give us a glutinous Moment of Grief when Evelyn gets the news that he was killed in action (contrast that to a similar scene staged so masterfully by Steven Spielberg in “Saving Private Ryan”); and for Danny, who’s been posted to Hawaii too, to take over as her loving consort. It’s hard to say which is sillier in the runup to the main action -- Rafe’s sudden return to life and the Hawaiian Islands (when he sees Evelyn and Danny together, his wordless stare says he understands), or the cockeyed subtitle that conveys a message radioed back to Tokyo by a Japanese admiral steaming toward glory: “The rise and fall of our empire is at stake!”

None of the love stuff has any resonance, because Mr. Bay has no use for setting scenes, or letting moments breathe, no interest in overtones or undertones; it’s one stentorian clang after another. Once the bombs start to fall, though, “Pearl Harbor” comes into its own. Waves of Japanese planes wreak monstrous destruction. Battleship Row is seized by explosions, engulfed by flames. Among the catastrophic casualties is the USS Oklahoma, which capsizes, in a stunning scene reminiscent of “Titanic,” sending crewman from its tilted deck to their deaths in the roiling water. Yet even this titanically expensive action film within the film lacks the clarity and variety of first-rate moviemaking, never mind the tragic vision of the Normandy invasion in “Private Ryan.”

Though kids may be tickled pink, history is demeaned when fighter planes chase one another through slot-streets reminiscent of “Star Wars.” The bloody chaos in Evelyn’s hospital is depicted erratically, with lurching camera moves and an intrusively diffusing film of Vaseline on the lens. The flyboys themselves can’t find enough to do. First they fly and dogfight, then they donate blood, then they help sailors out of stricken ships. In one glib transition, Mr. Bay cuts from the trapped sailors’ hands, stretching upward through ventilator baffles, to the hand of President Roosevelt (played by a plasticized Jon Voight) as he’s helped to his feet before giving the “Day of Infamy” speech. And the tone turns disgustingly maudlin when Roosevelt, who always tried to conceal his disability, meets with his advisors to discuss mounting a counterattack, and struggles up valiantly from his wheelchair while declaiming “Do not tell me it can’t be done!”

The counterattack turns out to be the remarkable, if mainly symbolic, air raid on Tokyo that was led by Col. James Doolittle and launched, in April of 1942, from the deck of a Navy carrier. Alec Baldwin does Doolittle with hoarse urgency, and guess which two rivals-in-love-but-still-best-buddies turn up flying two of the B-25 bombers. That’s exactly right, and if their participation stretches credibility, at least these two high-functioning Forrest Gumps aren’t later discovered flying the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. Yet the use of Doolittle’s raid for dramatic uplift illustrates the grab-bag quality of a troubled production that was probably compromised from the start.

Much has been written about “Pearl Harbor’s” budget cuts, casting choices -- no expensive superstars -- and internal strife; Michael Bay quit the project several times. A deeper problem seems to have been the mismatch between a complex historical subject and a razzle-dazzle action director (teamed up with a producer equally famous for flamboyant superficiality.) “Pearl Harbor” reportedly grew out of efforts by Disney to keep Mr. Bay in the corporate fold; development began after he expressed interest in what was nothing more than a vague notion. But action alone could never have sustained a film about Pearl Harbor, however the notion might have evolved.

What the subject needed most was a filmmaker with a human touch as well as the technical prowess to pull off big battle scenes. Mr. Bay had been able to turn cardboard into flesh and blood only with the help of powerful performers in the starring roles -- Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, for example, in “The Rock.” Yet “Pearl Harbor” lacked what he himself needed most, a cast rich in certifiable, irresistible movie stars.

Perhaps no actors on earth could have found gold in the dross of the final shooting script. Mr. Affleck doesn’t seem to try, although it’s good that he alternates his expressions between clenched jaw plus earnest frown and earnest frown plus clenched jaw. Ms. Beckinsale makes the most of what the script gives her; I do admire her lovely simplicity. Mr. Hartnett is likable in a murky part, and Cuba Gooding Jr. breathes a bit of life into the truncated role of the mess attendant Doris “Dorie” Miller, the first black to receive the Navy Cross. But “Pearl Harbor,” for all its cutting-edge pyrotechnics, remains a movie without a soul, a would-be epic whose most stirring character is a battleship in mortal agony.

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VIDEO TIP: Fred Zinnemann directed “From Here to Eternity” (1953) from Daniel Taradash’s exemplary adaptation of the James Jones novel about military life in Hawaii before Pearl Harbor. No matter how many times I see it, I’m still undone by the sight of Montgomery Clift’s Pruitt dying as the Japanese attack, and the haunting strains of “Re-Enlistment Blues.”

May 25, 2001 -- Film

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

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