Pearl Harbor

Director: Michael Bay

Actors:
The exit sign on the left of the screen.
This guy.
A guy with one eyebrow.
This woman with lipstick.
A guy with big ears.
John Voight.
Alec fucking Baldwin.

SHORT REVIEW: Its NOT worth it "just for the explosions" ... no way.

The Review:

Ferreting around in what remains of my memory - specifically, my memory of the films that I have reviewed on this website - I have reached the conclusion that, more often than not, I am rude about the films that I review. I can remember saying about SOMETHING that it was written by "three men in a bar on Wiltshire Boulevard." An image, I will admit here and now, that I stole from Arthur C. Clarke. I can remember saying that the script of some other wondrous effort was probably "written on big sheets of butchers paper, in crayon." That image, such as it is, I will acknowledge to be my own.

With "Pearl Harbor" the well springs of inspiration are sorely tested. I hope that this will suffice.

Imagine a very large white room. Imagine in it, if I may be so presumptuous, a squatting man in this room. Imagine that this man is wearing nothing except for a large, white, nappy.

Imagine that this man burrows around with his hand in the rear of this nappy and pulls forth a large firm, brown piece of turd. Now see this man start to write upon the white wall with this turd.

The turd will not hold a sharp point. The man shapes the turd with his fingers. Every so often, he chews his "pencil" while searching for inspiration.

Soon the room is completely covered in huge, brown writings. Some of it is readable. Most of it is not. There is a big bit, in the middle of one wall, where it appears that explosive diarrhea has been projected at the wall and ceiling. Mostly it is just swirls that look like writing. There is, to put it nicely, a bit of a pong.

That,dear reader, is the script for "Pearl Harbor."

I know. Simple abuse is not a review. I will do my best.

Two small boys live on a farm. They almost steal a crop dusting plane by accident. They "grow up" and ...somehow... become Pilots in the United States Army. Just as they are about to graduate to being like, you know, pilots, one of them falls in love with this like, nurse. Its like, great. They kiss and stuff. After a long time the pilot who is kissing the nurse (not the other one) goes away to fight the GERMANS in the BATTLE OF BRITAIN, in 1941.

He is great. He shoots down lots of GERMANS and the BRITISH think that he is TOPS and GREAT and IF THERE ARE ANY MORE LIKE YOU BACK HOME THE GERMANS SHOULD BE REALLY SCARED! After awhile one of the GERMANS shoots down this pilot guy and he like crashes into, like, the OCEAN.

His friend then pokes his girlfriend. They think it's GREAT. We get to watch. Just in case you are interested, there are no tits.

Meanwhile the JAPANESE have a large pond with model ships in it. They poke these model ships with sticks and say that they will attack the AMERICANS at PERAL HARBOR because they must START A WAR, even if THEY DON'T REALLY WANT TO START A WAR. Just because these JAPANESE are evil murdering scum who talk all subsonic like JABBA THE HUT, you see, does not mean they aren't really NICE GUYS.

Guess what? The pilot guy ISN'T DEAD! (Woh!) No, the other one. He comes back to PEARL HARBOR, and is REALLY ANGRY that his friend (the other guy) is fucking his girlfriend. They have a BIG FIGHT. Then they become FRIENDS again. Nobody fucks the nurse woman any more, at least, not on CAMERA.

Then the JAPANESE attack PEARL HARBOR. They blow a lot of stuff up. This happens about EXACTLY 40 (forty) minutes after the credits have started. Stuff blows up for about twenty minutes.

Then the AMERICANS are REALLY ANGRY. About twenty minutes later again, the film RE-ENACTS Colonel Dolittle's B-25 raid on Tokyo. This goes for about 10 minutes. Stuff blows up. Then ONE OF THEM DIES.

Not the pilot guy, the other one.

His friend brings him home in a box. The box has a flag on it. The nurse woman cries, cause you see, the other guy, when he fucked her, he made her PREGNANT. This is apparently how babies are made. The pilot guy decides to marry her anyway cause like he never got to suck his friend off (on camera anyway) and like, thats WHAT BEING AMERICAN IS ALL ABOUT!!

The end.

To describe the above as being laughably bad leaves out the fact that the actors can't act. At all. This here is the Udo Keir school of acting. This translates as: if it is "emotional" (any emotion) say it LOUDER; If it is REALLY emotional, hold the skin on your upper lip tight on your teeth.

The photographer cannot seen to take a picture without a flag in it (no editor on Earth could make a good film out of this garbage) and everything seems to be lit in a sickly yellow that is apparently supposed to simulate "olden times."

The director, putting it nicely, has not even achieved "bad" at what he has done here. "Bad" would be several levels of quality above this.

There you go. I've spoilt the plot for you. I have also (hopefully) inspired you to believe that the film is transcendentally fucked. Well you are wrong. The film is substantially worse than that. Substantially.

Hopefully, having read this review you will avoid this film altogether. You will watch buses pass you in the street, in the rain, in preference. If enough people do this, the people associated with this film will end up on the street eating garbage. This would, I am sad to report, go some way towards making up for the 2 hours of purgatory I sat through, the other night.

Some critics will have you believe that the history which surrounds the films "interpretation" of events at Pearl Harbor is wrong. This is not the case. The film bears as much relationship to history as a centre spread on "man wearing pants" in GQ magazine bears to George Orwell's "Animal Farm."

The fact that the film uses the memory of real dead people for its own brand of Nazi flag waving and pursuit of profit should not get in the way of the fact that it is above all, a pathetic piece of shit, in its own right.

This film, made while the world is largely at peace, is like some of the worst excesses of Nazi propaganda. The levels of flag waving, violent, irrational jingoism and simple lies inherent in this film have not been approached since John Wayne's film about Vietnam or some of the shit that came out of the Third Reich during the Second World War.

If I was an American, I would renounce my citizen-ship. I think I would probably become an Iraqi.

Sadly, I'm not joking. If this film is really indicative of American feelings in this day and age, the next war against fascism will be fought against America.

Thankfully though, they assure us, the good guys always win ... in the end.

Alex Rieneck

Rating: Pure vomit

(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2001.