Pearl Harbor (2001)

BBC decided to screen this risible film last night, so unable to resist one of the most compelling narratives of the war, I tuned in for a while. Michael Bay, the director, must be one of the clumsiest, most feeble in the business. How can anyone with such resources and such a story to tell create something so crass, trivial, and unconvincing. And then it dawned on me. This is an animated comic strip. That's why the characters are such caricatures. That's why the action sequences adopt a close, technicolor mode of presentation. Each little scene has one premise with no more subtlety or potential for development than the drawings in a comic strip. 'Wham! Bam! Agh!' Three or four Jap Zeros chase a car along a road and strafe it. Our superheroes duck down and all the bullets pass over their heads and the car continues on its course with a couple of holes in the windscreen. People sometimes praise the computer graphics, but I can't see why. Every scene that uses them looks as if it's using computer graphics. There's no sense of being-there realism. The presentation is absurd. Less is more in these circumstances. As to the acting of Ben Affleck, what can one say? He can't act. He has one-and-a-half expressions ranging from stupid to perplexed, and Kate Beckinsale is hardly much better. Whether regarded as a serious depicton of the raid, which reflected little credit on the professionalism of the US armed forces at the time, or simply as an action movie, this is dismal stuff. (picture from www.DarkMan.com)