Review of ‘Pearl Harbor’

The first thing that surprises about ‘Pearl Harbor’ is its deeply authorial character. The visual bombast of Michael Bay, who often can’t tell the wheat from the chaff, is displayed here with all of his Hawaiian splendor: the director of ‘Armageddon’ doesn’t care about filming a kiss or an execution; everything is great, essential. The goofy fanfare, disguised as an epic work, is the language that dominates the most, and in this love triangle with a warlike background, which tries to recover in part the aroma of the propaganda films of the 40s, the hand of this sensationalist is too noticeable catastrophe poet However, the best thing about Michael Bay, a true antidote to subtlety, is that he blindly believes what he says. Like a conqueror overwhelmed by his own utopia, he tells stories of heroism and self-sacrifice with conviction, and that is where the strength of his cinema comes from. A force that reaches orgasm in the sequence of the bombardment, a tour de force of three quarters of an hour that exceeds in realism the long final climax of ‘Titanic’, a model that Bay surely takes very seriously.

But that conviction is put at the service of a discourse that despises history as a source of empirically verifiable facts. Beyond ‘Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo’ or ‘Target Burma’, which next to ‘Pearl Harbor’ seem like far-left movies, he wants to convince us that Hiroshima and Nagasaki never existed and that war is simply a matter of point of sight. Few films show with such blatantness how where you place the camera determines your ideological perspective: while the attack on Pearl Harbor is shot at ground and water level, at eye level with the victims, the bombing of Tokyo is clean and overhead, the result of a victorious look. America has made the great propaganda movie of the 21st century just when it has no dead to be proud of.

‘Pearl Harbor’ is so fascist and fotonovelesca that it does not move even the softest of hearts: the story of friendship and betrayal is closer to the semantics of a vulgar TV movie than to the unbreakable codes of honor of Ford and Hawks cinema. The best that can be said for its unnecessary three hours of footage is that had it been released in the ’70s, the Zuckers would have had an easy time making their masterpiece: ‘Pearl Harbor’ effortlessly parodied itself.

For far-right kids who believe in love and war.

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DATA SHEET

Address: Michael Bay Distribution: Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding Jr., Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Jennifer Garner Original title: Pearl Harbor Country: USA Year: 2001 Gender: warlike Screenplay: randall wallace Duration: 182min

Synopsis: World War II shakes half the planet, but for Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), two young pilots, there is an even more important war, the one they fight for the heart of nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). ). She is sorry that they are in Oahu, Hawaii, and that the Japanese have bad intentions towards their military port: Pearl Harbor.