ET ISSUE 2198 Friday 1 June 2001

Watching history go up in flames

Its jingoistic self-belief contrives to make Pearl Harbor a crude travesty of the actual events. It is a lump of pure idiocy decrees Andrew O'Hagan

JOHN UPDIKE wrote: "America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." No matter what history says, America, in the end, always turns out to be a republic of smiles, and Hollywood seldom shirks its responsibility to confirm that the sun shines more strongly in America than it does anywhere else.

We should not, therefore, be surprised to see how American war movies always repaint history in such a way as to put a gloss on American virtues. When it comes to the Second World War - America's modern moment, its chance to rule - the fiction-makers have always gone into overdrive. America thinks it won the war and it thinks it won the peace.

Whatever the truth of either claim, American film-makers have always enlarged upon it, and the rest of the world has usually sat back and munched its popcorn with a smile, choosing to enjoy to the hilt America's fantasy of easygoing, brave-hearted, unaided world domination.

Pearl Harbor is like a three-hour advertisement for the mentality of George W Bush: with enormous gaiety, and plenty of technological panache, it turns some of the most crucial nuances of modern history into the image of an American flag snapping in the breeze, and it serves as an ignorant riposte to those who ever imagined that Britain and the Allies were the true, committed, long-term heroes of the Second World War.

May I simply make one or two factual interventions before moving on to discuss the dramatic awfulness of this movie? The Luftwaffe bombed London every single night between September 7 and November 2, 1940. Three thousand Londoners were killed in one night, May 10 of the following year, and 20,000 were killed in all, with 1,500,000 people being made homeless. I won't say anything about Coventry, Plymouth, Glasgow or Belfast. In the attack on Pearl Harbor, 2,000 died.

Pearl Harbor may have brought America into the war, but it did not take everyone else out of it. Director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer's movie is a piece of war pornography, weighed down with a sickening amount of historical self-importance, a ridiculous amount of patriotism and a tanker-full of sentimentality.

Ben Affleck plays young fighter ace Rafe McCawley, who sets out in the first part of the movie to win the war in Europe. He gets shot down, and everyone thinks that he is dead. But when he gets back to America he discovers that his buddy Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) has made off with his girlfriend, Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), and so the fireworks start. Oh, and by the way, in the middle of all this, Japanese planes attack Pearl Harbor, and the flag-waving, credit-claiming momentum is cranked up, but not so much as to quieten the lust of these young bucks in love.

The audience I watched Pearl Harbor with quite rightly gasped at the badness of the dialogue. I spent more than half of the time peeping through my fingers with embarrassment. No great and terrible event in human history, according to a certain kind of blockbustery mindset, is allowed to happen without there being some pointless, airless love story at its centre (the legacy of Titanic, I'm afraid, as well as a thousand forgettable war movies of the 1940s) and this one is no different.

Actually it's worse, because the grandiosity of the American view of their role, and the utter tastelessness of their cinematic bravado, means that the banal love story element serves only to further diminish the real sacrifices being made.

Kate Beckinsale is a sweet and intelligent actress and I can only despair that she was ever tempted into this mess. The picture takes several other notable casualties: Ewen Bremner, one of Britain's best actors, plays a stammering sucker with abysmal lines, and Affleck shows himself almost mindlessly willing to step up to the plate and bat for ideologies he can't understand.

And, for all the film's rapid bombings, flayings, and photogenic aerial dynamics, that is the real horror of Pearl Harbor: its method and its message are crude, self-glorifying, unhistorical, vengeful and just plain ugly.

I had thought that the year's other out-and-out cinematic atrocity, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, could not be beaten in terms of its cultureless, colonising manner with respect to difficult historical truths, but in Pearl Harbor the film-makers take the whole thing to another level, quite off the scale, with a love story that just happens to have a bit of world history as a handy backdrop.

No intelligent person could like this film. No one, even with the gravest hunger for entertainment, could find themselves able to stomach the frenetic pace of a film so lacking in basic excitement.

This week it emerged that more people under the age of 20 are likely to vote in Big Brother than will vote in the general election: I fear it is only to that part of the population that Pearl Harbor will seem gratifying. When it comes to some modern movies, the conspiracy to make people happy is the same thing as the conspiracy to make them stupid.

A lot of you hated the American submarine drama U-571 last year, but compared to Pearl Harbor that film is a masterpiece. Even From Here to Eternity looks positively intellectually searing next to this lump of pure idiocy. The expensive digital reconstruction of the bombardment - the film allows us many a bomb's-eye view as it goes in for the kill, and there's no doubting the sophistication of those images - sinks under the horizon of the film's many mythical white-washings and lies.

The relationship between white and black servicemen, known to have been especially evil at the naval base at Pearl Harbor, is as cute as apple pie, and the role of the Allies in formulating the course of the war is air-brushed out.

This is truly a blockbuster movie of the modern era: a film in which nothing in the world matters so much as American suffering and American bravado. The whole thing would make my merchant-seaman grandfather turn in his watery grave.

-- Anonymous, June 01, 2001