THE DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY had a dream one night as he considered how to film an epic movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In his dream, he followed a bomb, falling from a plane, as it descended ever more rapidly to crash into the deck of a ship. He awakened, gripped with an obsession to realize his vision on film. And in the mammoth new Pearl Harbor, Bay’s vision is realized. The bomb falling from a Japanese Zero, which comes about halfway through the movie’s three hours, is Pearl Harbor’s “money shot.” Securing the money shot for a high-budget action film has become a Hollywood obsession ever since the first commercial for Independence Day ran during the Super Bowl in 1996. The commercial featured an alien spacecraft blowing up the White House, and it electrified the moviegoing public, which then had to wait breathlessly for six months until the film finally opened on July 3. Independence Day earned $50 million in its first weekend, shattering all previous records, and market research indicated the audience had been drawn to it primarily because of repeated exposure to the money shot. The term “money shot” actually comes from the world of pornography. It refers to a sex film’s climactic moment, which is designed to leave nothing to the imagination. The money shot in mainstream action movies is achieved through the magic of special effects, but the intent is the same: To cause the watcher to gasp and shudder. And never has the money shot been quite so pornographic as it is in Pearl Harbor. Michael Bay removes all the horror and tragedy from the Japanese sneak attack, leaving only the sensation — the explosions, the fire, the aerial acrobatics. It’s the way-coolest depiction of the destruction of 2,273 soldiers and sailors and much of America’s Pacific fleet you will ever see. None of the bodies bobbing in the water or trapped in the wreckage of the USS Arizona belong to characters we know or care about, whose death might give us a sense of what was lost on December 7, 1941. For some bizarre reason, Pearl Harbor is a movie about pilots, not seamen, and only one major character suffers even an injury in the attack. Pearl Harbor reduces a world-changing event to a noisy computer simulation. The bombs, bullets, and explosions are the real heroes of this movie because, man, they really do their stuff. That’s why Pearl Harbor is as obscene as porn videos that feature a real, live money shot. And when Pearl Harbor is not obscene, it’s almost unbelievably stupid. I am not exaggerating when I say it may have the worst screenplay ever written. The dialogue by Randall Wallace is so bad, many of the scenes could be performed verbatim on Saturday Night Live as parodies. Right after the attack, a woman confesses in a frustrated whine: “I was going to tell you, but then…This Happened!” Later, the great flying ace Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) looks over his squadron and says, “I think we’re going to win this war, and you know why? Them. There’s nothing braver than the heart of a volunteer.” And in a scene that will live in infamy, Franklin Roosevelt (Jon Voight, and no, I’m not kidding) rises from his wheelchair to his feet and tells his depressed military staff, “Do not tell me what can’t be done!” The plot, if you can call it that, concerns two lifelong friends, played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. They join the Army and become pilots. Ben is a cocky lad who always breaks the rules. Josh is awkward with the ladies because his daddy didn’t treat him right back in Tennessee. In 1940, Ben volunteers to fly for the British, but doesn’t tell Josh, because he’s always trying to protect Josh. But before he goes, he falls in love with the beautiful nurse (Kate Beckinsale) who gives him a shot in his posterior during his physical. “He has a nice butt,” she tells her tittering friends in one of the movie’s persistent and unintentionally hilarious anachronisms. (My favorite comes in the attack, when Josh says, “I think World War II just started!”) In England, Ben pines for Kate. In Hawaii, Kate pines for Ben. One day Ben gets shot down. We see his plane crash into the English Channel. Then we see Josh come to give Kate the bad news. As the movie inches forward with all the speed and excitement of a tortoise race, Josh and Kate fall in love — guilt-riddled love, of course, because they’re both thinking of Ben. Meanwhile, in Japan, an attack is being planned. One morning, Kate vomits in the bathroom. Guess what? She’s pregnant. And before she can tell Josh, who should show up but…you guessed it! It’s Ben! We then get to see what happened when his plane crashed. It was sinking in the English Channel, but he saw Kate’s face floating in the water outside his cockpit and somehow found the strength to break through the glass and escape into occupied France. Which is why he couldn’t get a message out to tell Josh and Kate not to indulge in nooky. Ben figures out what has happened. He punches Josh, and then they fall asleep in a convertible overlooking Honolulu Harbor — from which we cut to a Japanese general tearing a date off his calendar to expose “December 7.” Ben and Josh are awakened by the bombs. We see the bombers as they fly over a tableau lifted from Ronald Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” commercials in 1984 — three boy scouts in a tent, a woman hanging laundry on a clothesline, a Little League game (at 8 in the morning?). What follows is forty-five minutes of explosions and dogfights, and weirdly photographed scenes of Kate at the hospital trying to deal with the wounded and dying. Pearl Harbor’s first half is almost entirely unrelated to the attack, and the film makes no effort to explain what we’re seeing during the strike — where the U.S. ships are, what they do, or what the Japanese battle plan is. Ben and Josh do manage to shoot down some enemy planes — but that comes after the damage has been done (although the film suggests that their entry into the battle is what convinces the Japanese to go home, thus turning defeat into victory). With the bombing over, it’s time to get back to the insufferable story. Kate tells Ben that she’s having Josh’s baby. But she doesn’t tell Josh. And then Josh and Ben leave Hawaii to join Jimmy Doolittle in the daring retaliatory raid on Tokyo. It seems to have been Bay’s original intention to suggest that Doolittle’s raid followed immediately afterward — since a sarong-wearing Kate shows no visible signs of pregnancy on the day of the raid, five months following Pearl Harbor. As Ben and Josh fly over Japan, Bay offers a parallel image to his Morning-in-America montage. Three women are standing on a little wooden bridge at the foot of something that looks like Mt. Fuji. Bay surely intends to make a point here about how war disrupts civilian life, but it actually looks like our heroes are on their way to blow up a high-school production of The Mikado. There’s about fifteen minutes left of this travesty, which finally resolves its love triangle by killing off one of the two boys, in a hilarious recapitulation of the movie’s opening scene. And so, once again, everything bows to Hollywood’s insistence that movies have “arc” — even a movie about the bloodiest and most important war the world has ever seen. Like Michael Bay, I have had a dream — a dream in which Hollywood does not defile and degrade history in pursuit of this year’s money shot. Unlike Michael Bay, I have no hope of seeing my dream turned into a reality. A contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
