Virtues for the Vicious

The Notably Unenthusiastic Return of the Michael Bay Retrospective is here, and you guys thought that I'd forgotten all about it. No, I just chose to pretend it didn't exist for a while. Michael Bay Retrospective, you are the troll that lives under my stairs. You know how to twist my loves into something awful and irrational that haunts me for days and your eyes are two pools of terror and rabies. However, you can't slam a Michael Bay retrospective closed in a hardcover book and expect it to turn into cocaine, so instead of being afraid for the rest of my life, I'm going to stand up to this retrospective and finish the shit out of it. At least that's how I felt until I watched Pearl Harbor.

I'd like you guys to know that I'm plunging my face into a bowl made of scalding hot hot sauce and filled with scalding hot lime juice for YOU, even if I consider my ego a reader of my blog. I'll accept your girlfriends as payment.

So I'm pretty over Michael Bay at this point; his movies are just bad. His action is pretty pedestrian and his editors, brave though they may be for working on a Michael Bay film, don't seem to be able to keep up with him. Furthermore, he's now given me two movies in a row with such unabashed sentimentality that it's like being punched in the face by a man made of sugar. Armageddon had that totally unearned death scene with Bruce Willis, and I thought that was bad. On the plus side, there isn't any weird fetishism in this film, but Michael Bay still doesn't seem to get sex.

Pearl Harbor is a controlled, committee-branded attempt to cash in on the real-life events of Pearl Harbor and the flag-waving and country-singing that the phrase itself instigates. That sounds like something any grouchy critic might say, but I stand by it.

That it's artificially lengthened by about two hours, and includes enough flag-waving to bolster the flag industry and push us out of this recession is enough proof to me. The constant speech-making and the indecent amount of patriotism are like the steel bolts in the USS Arizona.

Frankly the scope is just too big. You can't create two characters meant to be heroes and put them in the center of Pearl Harbor and have them continue to be the center of the film without making them single-handedly turn back the Jap invasion and win the war. Bay opts to create an ensemble of characters and follow them around during the attack, which is a common enough trick (but one that rarely works out - see: Bobby). That's okay, but for my taste I'd rather follow one character or one group and get a feel for them and their character and how they react to the situation than getting flashes of 2-dimensional characters doing heroic things and then disappearing into the ether.

But that's just me. Instead of saying what I would like to have seen, I'll just poke holes in what the film did do. For one, the ground-level view of battle, seen through the eyes of our three leads, their friends and squadmates and commanding officers is sort of gimped by us constantly going back to FDR making profound speeches to the Joint Chiefs. Oh, then we quantum leap into the Japanese military and listen to them talk about how America just can't be beat because they've got so much heart and baseball is fun. That sucked, too.

The general thrust of the story is "into the heart of modern Japan, who we will never let live down the events of Pearl Harbor, even though we stole their military and are at their robotic mercy" via Rafe McCawley, played by apple pie (I'm just joking, it's Ben Affleck. But seriously. Apple pie. America. Heart disease. Corporations.) and his best bud Danny Walker. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, they're the stereotypical American fighter pilots/best buds that you would see in any movie made during World War II, and we even get introduced to Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) in the manner of any one of those wartime romances. Unfortunately, this mildly successful portion of the film is at odds with everything else in the movie, with its camp and lite tone against the rest of the film's devout seriousness. We spend a lot of time following Evelyn and her group of girls, who I think are nurses but are shown getting Purple Hearts at the end, so maybe they were secret agents who were putting bombs in the bodies of the wounded and throwing them at the Japanese.

It doesn't take long for Rafe to be presumed dead and for Danny to fuck Evelyn, setting into motion a mindfuck of contrived romantic triangularity and soap opera buttfucking. This in the middle of a fucking (PG-13) war movie that constantly cuts to FDR (portrayed not as the crippled socialist we all love, but as the brash, invincible and still pretty crippled ideal leader by the insane Jon Voight, in full repentance for his hippie days). It's no wonder that when this movie came out, when I was eleven, my image of it was a man-man-lady threesome in the water during the attack. I didn't know what a train was then, but now I think that's a funny image.

I just don't see how all these pieces fit together. It reeks of a script given a checklist by a studio for maximum emotional manipulation. If you're a communist, you'll still get sucked in by the love story, if you're black you'll be crying at the sight of the first black man to ever win the Medal of Honor, if you love water you'll be devastated by all the splashing and boat sinking. It really does have something for everyone, as long as you don't like things that are good.

As for Michael Bay, his filmmaking is as gaudy as ever, but I don't think his evil has really shown its true form yet. He's still pretending like he's a patriot that isn't planning the downfall of Western civilization.

My favorite of his directorial flourishes in this movie had something to do with Ewen Bremner. Ewen Bremner plays the goofy, stuttering squadmate of our two heroes, and at the beginning he sparks a romance with the hottest bitch in that group of nurses (I think it's Jaime King but don't hold me to that). They eventually get married and are happy and idyllic while Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett fight over the somewhat less attractive Kate Beckinsale. It's pretty nice of Bay to give Ewen Bremner a better, more successful romance than Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, but then Bay unceremoniously blows up Bremner's wife. A lot of people die in this movie, but none of them get the same joyously enthusiastic sadism aimed towards Bremner for being goofy, ugly and stuttery. It's like a cut scene from In the Company of Men.

Michael Bay's fingerprints seem sort of drowned out here; it's so obvious that the film had a billion people working on it during the conceptual stages. The worst crime that the film commits isn't even really Bay's fault. As director, he's liable for the content of his film, but the absurd padding is the fault of the screenwriter(s), first and foremost. First of all, it's an hour of bullshit before the attack even starts, and then that goes on for an hour, and then there's an hour of getting back at the Japs by showing the Doolittle Raid. Meanwhile, we get about ten thousand disconnected sub-plots, like Cuba Gooding Jr. saving the world. He never even meets the heroes. He's only there to get affluent blacks into the audience (a tap-worthy demo if those Madea films are any indication), but is a trainwreck from a story point of view. And there's about fifteen minutes dedicated to Evelyn convincing an officer who she saved earlier in the film to let her listen in on the radios while Rafe and Danny bomb the Japs back, and it adds nothing to the story. It's just more padding to make the movie three hours long. It's embarrassing how badly this film wants to be epic.

One last thing because this is getting much too long. The jignostic attitude the film takes isn't uncommon for war films, but I was really turned off by the way the film refuses to acknowledge that, yes, we got fucked at Pearl Harbor. Instead of offering an ending where America is shaken and disturbed by certain events, it tacks on an hour of Danny and Rafe going back to Japan to get them back and wave the shit out of some flags.

In short, this is a horrible, horrible movie that bored me punch-drunk. I can't believe I have four more movies in this series.

2/10