《珍珠港》英文影评

杭州电子科技大学

学生课程期末论文

开课学期：2009-2010学你那第二学期

教师姓名：杨玉明

学生年级：2008级

课程性质：全校限选

考试性质：考察

考察时间：2010年6月12

学生姓名：葛俊峰

学生学号：08052211

所在学院：计算机学院

学生专业：软件工程

Pearl Harbor

Director: Michael Bay

Actor: Ben Affleck

Josh Hartnett

Kate Beckinsale

Cuba Gooding Jr.

Alec Baldwin

Jon Voight

Pearl Harbor is a monstrous, costly and utterly disrespectful abomination

of film with pretensions of serious emotional weight and proper historical

context. With the cost of the movie comparable to the damage costs of the

actual Dec. 7, 1941, attack, more attention should've been paid to the

script and research instead of all the models and gasoline for an attack

sequence that, while spectacular, was more appropriate for a Star Wars

clone or a video game than an actual World War II-era film.

And that's about the only "positive," if you can call it that, of that

hack Michael Bay's Oscar-bait project. Many history buffs have ripped the

movie from the angle of historical inaccuracy and omission. Assuming that

Pearl Harbor is not meant to be a documentary, but a work of historical

fiction, lack of historical accuracy and comprehensiveness is by far the

least significant of Pearl Harbor's problems, per se, although such

blatant historical carelessness certainly starts to say a lot about the

movie as a whole.

But, if Pearl Harbor's aim was to be a work of fiction, it has also

miserably failed at that. It fails as literature, and it fails as a film.

Pearl Harbor tries to be an amalgamation of three past classic movies on

the subjects it covers: 1) From Here to Eternity, a clever and well acted

telling of the stories of several characters' romantic pursuits and

personal struggles right before the attack on Pearl Harbor disrupted

everything, 2) Tora! Tora! Tora!, a mostly factual, well balanced

depiction of the planning and execution of the actual Pearl Harbor attack

with vintage cinematography, and 3) Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a

meticulously detailed depiction of the Doolittle Raid with a schmaltzy

but genuine love subplot involving one actual soldier and his wife. But

Pearl Harbor falls far short of all three aforementioned films on not only

their own terms, but simply as movies.

Instead of From Here to Eternity's clever dialogues and personal plot

twists and romantic moments dripping alternately with irony and genuine

warmth, Pearl Harbor wastes its first hour and a half of screen time

setting up a sophomoric love triangle that could have been ripped straight

from daytime television soap operas and trash talk shows.

The triangle involves two generically glamorous flyboys, played by Ben

Affleck and Josh Hartnett, who have been friends since childhood. Even

their names, Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker, are mundane. Rafe (Affleck)

falls in love with a nurse who presides over his physical named Evelyn

(played by Kate Beckinsale), who is also generically glamorous. Rafe and

Evelyn spend the next hour or so exchanging pallid lines of dialogue that

try too hard to hammer into the audience that, yes, they are in love. Sort

of like Shakespeare or Petrarch without any brains and about four

centuries too late. In any case, Rafe goes to Britain to fly for the Royal

Air Force, where he faces serious butt-kissing from the Brits in a

disgustingly patronizing depiction of both British and Americans, and

gets shot down over London. But (who didn't see this coming) he lives.

But Evelyn thinks he's dead. And so does Danny (Hartnett). After the token

few minutes of mourning, Danny and Evelyn fly above Hawaii and then make

it like rabbits under parachutes, invoking obvious parallels to Titanic's

"I'm flying" scene followed by good ol' shagging in a car backseat. More

faux-sonnet dialogue follows. Then, just like clockwork, Rafe comes back,

poor Evelyn is caught in the middle, and Danny and Rafe fight Jerry

Springer-style. Then it gets interrupted by the spectacular but oddly fake

and inhuman money siphon ... er ... I mean, attack sequence characterized

by CGI copies of trapped and screaming people.

Meanwhile, Pearl Harbor occasionally alternates to shots of

somber-looking Japanese spies and soldiers planning the attack, all

accompanied by evil-sounding music, going out of the way to make the

Japanese look like devious souls out for revenge because America wouldn't

give them their oil (convenient partial reasoning). Then, in an attempt

to make the Japanese appear somewhat remorseful, the script calls for

Admiral Yamamoto to utter his famous "brilliant man" and "sleeping giant"

lines.

After the attack, Jon Voight does a wonderful impression of Peter Sellers'

Dr. Strangelove. Only problem is, he was supposed to be Franklin D.