Pearl Harbor (major spoilers)

We'd already got tickets for Pearl Harbor, so I left the office, met Jon just as Douglas was approaching from afar, and we went shopping. Holly was waiting inside the cinema, in good spirits and talkative, full of grapevine gossip and reviews in the Independent. We were all prepared for a disaster of a film, as opposed to a mere disaster film - rarely, since Titanic, has critical opinion and public response been so sharply polarised. In a nutshell, the critics hate it, citing the central battle sequence as tremendous while the ridiculous love story and shameless patriotic fluff is reminiscent of the worst kind of blockbuster (cf. Armageddon). The public love it, largely because you get to see Ben Affleck's arse (although it probably isn't even his, anyway).

How do I talk about Pearl Harbor? Frankly, it was a mess. The early flashback scene establishes the friendship but is a little too neat, while the later dialogue ("Can you hear that thumping?" "No, I think that's my heart") is excruciating. The sets are authentic and the acting is passable, but it was dull, with nothing of any interest going on….until we skipped to the Japanese camps. Portraying the Japanese as intelligent, balanced human beings instead of totalitarian fascist bastards may have shown a definite swing towards political correctness, but on the other hand it did balance out the tone of the film and get away from the America-is-always-right philosophy.

Back in Hawaii and Ben Affleck's back from the dead. Gee, didn't see that coming….there's the obligatory drunk-in-the-bar scene and then the bombs hit. After I'd woken up, I suddenly realised that the movie had stepped up a few notches on the excitement scale: things were getting interesting. The bombing campaign itself lasted forty minutes in real life, and that was the same amount of time it took in the film, and there's no doubting that it was this sequence that took up most of the budget. From the opening shots of the Japanese planes taking off, to Dan Aykroyd's worried communications officer (nobody believes him; it's no wonder he's put so much weight on), to the now-famous shot of the planes flying past the woman hanging out washing and the boy playing baseball, to that beautiful panoramic drop from the plane, following the first bomb down to the docked ship….the whole thing was relentless, glorious entertainment.

If anything, as Jon pointed out later, the bombing run did show Pearl Harbor for the disaster it really was (I'm talking about the event now, not the movie), and also showed how organised the Japanese were. As the commander, his eyes filled with regret, refuses to send a third wave of planes on the ground that they have lost the element of surprise, he nonchalantly dismisses the heavy congratulations poured upon him, and then adds "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant". If Titanic was about cause and effect, and how one collision led to a chain of events that filled the ship with water and then caused it to split in two along its hull, Pearl Harbor was about a seemingly random set of mini-disasters - the bombing of the hospital, Cuba Gooding Jr. coming into his own as the boxing chef who finally gets to prove his worth behind a Gatling gun, and finally Affleck himself running across the airfield (under the watchful gaze of Tom Sizemore, no less) to get to the planes before they get blown up. By cutting back and forth between these three stories, and intercutting them with other scenes as people lived and died and almost died, we could see that even if the Japanese were organised, the effects of their bombing run seemed to be mass destruction on a totally random scale.

The ships split in half and we could hear people tapping on the inside, and I thought hang on, I've seen this somewhere before…and then, on the other ship (the one that can't sink because it has one of the stars on it) a plane swoops across and fires a machine gun. The commander is riddled with bullets and collapses to the deck - and then, as if on cue, his fucking dog jumps out of his arms and runs back along the deck, unhurt. As if this wasn't bad enough, we see the same dog in a lower deck earlier just before it gets blown to smithereens, only to emerge unscathed. I can't work out whether the writers were paying a tribute to the indestructible dog scenario. If it was an intentional nod, they must gain Kudos for inserting a little ironic humour in the face of adverse tragedy. Otherwise, every single one of them deserves to be taken outside and shot by the Japanese.

The rest of the movie was nothing much to write home about: Jon Voight (a splendid Roosevelt who had long speeches and, as a result, most of the best dialogue) got up from his wheelchair, and then it was back to Alec Baldwin. Baldwin was playing an air force commander who was so gung-ho he was dangerous: they really should have clipped his wings years ago. Like Starship Troopers' Michael Ironside, he turned up briefly at the beginning only to have a bigger role in the final act, as the surviving troops made a retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo. To be honest it was a weak climax. I don't care about historical accuracy - they had to condense the events to add narrative flow and improve the structure, and I don't have a problem with this. But nothing happened in this finale, which vaguely reminiscent of Memphis Belle - only the story ran out of fuel much sooner than the planes did.

It was at this point that I realised I'd spent most of the three hours or so working out which of the characters in the love triangle was going to die (hey, come on! This is a war movie! There's no other way you could have done it!). I turned out to be wrong, but as someone who was always off the mark when it came to guessing the villains in Scooby Doo (if I thought it was the janitor, it turned out to be the creepy boss, if I thought it was the creepy boss, it turned out to be the janitor) I guess I've got used to it. And finally, the biggest insult of all - Kate Beckinsale (an English actress, for crying out loud) doing her voiceover against a stars-and-stripes background: "America survived. America grew strong, and we learned to fight back against adversity." We all thought it was amazing that Beckinsale's unmarried character- despite suddenly becoming a medical genius when the hospital opened up - looked not even remotely pregnant during the medal-giving ceremony ("Never mind the fact", as Jon pointed out, "that she would have been kicked out of the army anyway").

Cue closing scenes back on the farm with little boy (who takes the name of Affleck's now-dead best friend, which is frankly distasteful) and happy mother - domestic bliss as opposed to the earlier disharmony in the opening. And ridiculous Oscar-nominated love song as the credits rolled. It was the longest three hours of my life. We stumbled out, and Jon, ever the voice of creative optimism, said "Well, it wasn't that bad."
"No, it wasn't," agreed Holly. "But please, I mean, can we all go home and throw up now?!?"

(Friday, 1st June 2001)