![]() We see a lot of the red “Rising Sun” flag, but no “banzai’s,” robotic emperor worship, or foaming at the mouth, though we do get the ridiculously contrived shot of innocent children playing next to a top-level military meeting. They do this by adding a half hour with the two pilots flying together on Jimmy Doolittle’s “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” raid, the suicide mission demanded by President Roosevelt to rally American morale at home.Īnd mercifully, the film does not demonize the Imperial Japanese admirals and pilots who lead the attack. The utter defeat of Pearl Harbor would end the picture on a downer, so obeying the formula of Hollywood storytelling the filmmakers have to find some way to show America fighting back. That’s partly because the story doesn’t climax with the attack. Though the movie vividly recreates the illusion of experiencing the attack, in a computer-enhanced set piece that lasts almost as long as the real event, audiences will not likely be moved to go out and seek revenge. PEARL HARBOR strives to be familiar and therefore comforting to the movie audience so they can leave the theater feeling pacified, not agitated. It recycles the lyrical bi-plane flight from OUT OF AFRICA, and the screaming point of view of the falling A-bomb from DR. PEARL HARBOR even lifts shots from TITANIC, from the sailors clinging to the deck of the USS Arizona as it slides at right angle into the water to the masses of floating bodies. It operates on the intellectual and emotional level of another historical disaster movie with a generic title, TITANIC, with two love stories for the price of one in the triangle between two fighter pilots and a nurse. ![]() It’s a ponderous, bloated 3-hour spectacle that exists only to provide video arcade explosions for the boys and a love story for the girls in the movie’ 12 to 25 year old target audience. ![]() It has nothing new to say about the attack, the war, or anything else. Like it or not, Pearl Harbor defines our lives.īut it’s impossible to take Disney’s PEARL HARBOR seriously as a film, or a threat. We spent three years in American concentration camps as retribution for Pearl Harbor, solely because we looked like the enemy. There are only two questions that Japanese American audiences have going into a screening of the new Disney movie, PEARL HARBOR: Am I going to get punched in the face by kids coming out of the theater looking for revenge? And are Japanese Americans once again going to be blamed for conspiring in the attack?Īfter all, we’ve spent the past 60 years distancing ourselves from the Imperial Japanese Navy that attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
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