(contains movie spoilers)

The surprise attack on Admiral Husband E. Kimmel’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor served as a wake up call to the U.S. The two-hour attack killed 2,403 Americans and temporarily placed the Imperial Japanese Navy as the dominant naval force in the Pacific. In addition, it exposed America’s flaw of being late to adopting the doctrine of aircraft carrier warfare and its need for mass production of arms. Since this attack on Dec. 7, 1941, there have been countless documentaries and movie adaptations that have all tried their hand at retelling the story of meticulous planning, courage and sadness that make up Pearl Harbor. One of the latest and most well known is Pearl Harbor, directed by Michael Bay and released in 2001. Now, 20 years after the movie aired in theaters and 80 years after the original attack, it’s clear that the movie, starring Ben Affleck and Josh Harnett, has not aged well nor lived up to expectations.

At first glance, Pearl Harbor’s cast makes it appear to be a good movie. A lineup of renowned actors like Ben Affleck, Tom Sizemore, Dan Akyroyd, and even Jon Voight who plays President Franklin D. Roosevelt seems unlikely to produce a poor quality film. However, Pearl Harbor at the core of its plot has major issues. The movie as a whole puts far more focus on the love triangle established between pilots Rafe McCawley (played by Affleck), Danny Walker (played by Harnett), and Rafe’s girlfriend Evelyn, who serves as a nurse. Meanwhile, the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, while having some cinematically stunning aspects, is riddled with computer generated imagery (CGI) and takes up far less screen time than the development of love between Evelyn and Danny while Rafe is fighting with the Royal Air Force in Europe.

Pearl Harbor spends most of its run time on nearly everything except for the events of Pearl Harbor itself. The movie encompasses other irrelevant historical events aside from Dec. 7, 1941 such as the Battle of Britain and the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, which are part of the reason why the movie is so long. In addition, throughout the action and historical recollection of the film, the romantic undertones of the love triangle between Rafe, Danny and Evelyn continually nag at the audience, which somewhat ruins Pearl Harbor as a historical movie by deciding to appeal to the audience’s taste in movie relationships over educating them on the historical events that brought the US into the Second World War. 

Another issue with Pearl Harbor is it’s over reliance on CGI to captivate the audience. Almost the entire attack on Pearl Harbor is done with CGI, and it significantly degrades the quality of the movie and its historical retelling of what actually happened. One of the most notable events of the attack was the heroic actions of Doris Miller, who manned an anti aircraft gun on his ship, the USS West Virginia, and shot down several Japanese aircraft. Miller, an African American, was assigned as a cook during a period where African Americans were severely limited in their jobs in the military. Miller would become the first African American to be awarded the Navy Cross, the second highest award in the U.S. Navy, only succeeded by the Medal of Honor. Pearl Harbor fails to fully encompass the significance of Miller’s efforts, as his scenes in the movie only show him manning the gun and screaming at an aircraft approaching his ship, eventually shooting it down. Nearly the entire scene, along with many of the other scenes displaying major events such as the the detonation of the USS Arizona that killed 1,077 men in an instant, are done with CGI. By comparison, the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! uses no CGI due to limitations of film quality and equipment, but does a much better job of actually showing the audience what happened at Pearl Harbor by featuring real explosions and destruction of aircraft, hangers and ships.

“Pearl Harbor is a movie that focuses too much on romance and not enough on the war. If they’re going to include other events besides Pearl Harbor, it needs to be more fleshed out. In Pearl Harbor, the only thing we heard from Europe was when Hitler and his Axis Powers were invading Poland, and after that we didn’t hear anything else.” said junior Alexander Hernandez.

Overall, Pearl Harbor is a film that simultaneously tries too hard and not enough to tell the events of Pearl Harbor. It puts a fictional romantic relationship at the forefront of what the audience should pay attention to, and puts actual history in the backseat. Then it tries to make up for its lackluster historical elements by attempting to satisfy the audience with cool CGI. Films like Tora! Tora! Tora! and documentaries simply tell and focus more on the story of Dec. 7, 1941.

Photograph courtesy of WIKIMEDIA COMMONS