Everything about Pearl Harbor is epic: the movie’s historical source material (December 7, 1941: the “day of infamy,” when the Japanese navy and air force assaulted the American fleet in Hawaii in a devastating surprise attack), the movie’s budget ($135 million), its running time (three hours), the filmmaking styles of director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (who previously made The Rock and Armageddon), and its world premiere (a reportedly $5 million event for some 2,000 guests including stars, international press, and top military, studio, and political brass, held aboard the USS John C. Stennis, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that is the largest ship in the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet).
The movie, whose action highlight is a spectacular 40-minute re-enactment of the raid, is framed by a love story: a romantic triangle formed by best friends Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett) who are both in love with the same beautiful nurse, Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale). It’s a formula that worked well for Titanic — young, sexy Hollywood stars set against a historical disaster from an earlier time period and one whose outcome is well-known (it was an iceberg, stupid) — and it’s a formula that’s expected to deliver the summer’s biggest blockbuster movie. But Pearl Harbor strives to deliver a larger theme: Heroism resides in the hearts of ordinary men and women, although the concept of individual sacrifice has been largely lost among today’s youth.
Tom Brokaw has now famously called those who lived through World War II the “greatest generation,” and much of his recent publishing and broadcasting has sought to commemorate and valorize these lives. Pearl Harbor can be seen as a reintroduction to this generation’s “old-fashioned” ideals of heroism and sacrifice. Pearl Harbor hopes to reel in great numbers of viewers and ladle out liberal doses of inspiration along with the entertainment. The movie’s romance may echo the illicit lovemaking of From Here to Eternity (instead of making out in the Hawaiian beach surf with the frustrated wife of the commander, in Pearl Harbor, a guy makes out in parachute netting with his best friend’s girl). But at its heart, the movie is a patriotic rouser like Sergeant York, the 1941 Gary Cooper movie about a Tennessee hellraiser-turned-war hero, which inspired a nation as it slowly shed its isolationism and officially entered the WWII conflict. (Rafe and Danny, incidentally, hail from Tennessee, “the volunteer state.”)
“I’m not anxious to die, just anxious to matter,” says Rafe. It is this sense of wanting to make a difference in the world and the realization that there may be values in life worth defending — even at great personal cost — that Pearl Harbor hopes to revive. Screenwriter Randall Wallace, whose first script was the award-winning Braveheart, clearly intended to create characters whose heroism is part of their fiber and whose historical integrity resonates in the present time. Much time was spent by the filmmakers and actors, talking with survivors and historical advisers, taking care to get the facts right. The men were sent to boot camp and worked with actual fighter pilots, and Beckinsale studied with former nurses. Historical advisor Jack A. Green, involved with the project from the beginning, comments, “We were very aware of what was historical fact and what was dramatic license. My principal job was to advise the departments of the military and the studio about what things were dramatic license and what possible effects that dramatic license might have. The movie’s primary emphasis, however, is to entertain the American public. But it’s the studio’s film. My job was to make sure that all parties concerned knew what they were doing and made the management decisions from there.”
“I was really humbled by the experience,” says Bay. “I met with a lot of survivors. Being where it all happened … it changes you. And I was always telling the studio, we have to treat this with dignity in everything we do — the marketing, everything. We cannot be selling Big Mac McDonald Packs. This movie is about people who died here.”
Most of the key people involved were born at least a generation or two after the war and possessed various degrees of knowledge about the events. Star Josh Hartnett talks of how he researched the part by reading through letters his great-uncle, who was at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, sent home to his family. “The whole time he was there he sent letters home to my grandmother and his sisters and my great-aunt and my great-grandparents. And I had a stack of these letters, and I read through the whole thing.”
In addition to the love story and the attack on Pearl Harbor, there is a third section of the movie that involves the little-studied Doolittle Raid. The attack was named after its charismatic colonel, who led a group of volunteer airmen in a daring retaliatory mission on Japan, a mission whose probability of success was uncertain at best, but whose example bolstered global morale. Although no Pearl Harbor survivors actually participated in the raid, the movie uses dramatic license to enlist Rafe and Danny in the campaign. Wallace and Bay felt strongly that the Doolittle Raid should be integrated into the Pearl Harbor story. Bay argues that “the Doolittle Raid sums up what that generation’s about: how they would volunteer to step forward for their country, how we rose from these ashes of Pearl Harbor.”
More than relying merely on its hunky heroes, Pearl Harbor takes pains to display instances of heroism in places where Hollywood blockbusters don’t ordinarily look — in other words, in ordinary places. Before the attack, the military nurses were largely tending to non-combative cuts and sunburns in relatively empty hospital wards while stationed on a paradise island full of abundant natural beauty and male companionship. During the attack, the movie shows that their lives were also at risk, and that they behaved courageously, ingeniously, and tirelessly in face of the thousands of wounded and burned soldiers delivered to their doorstep and the immense depository of corpses that lined their corridors. Early in the movie Rafe flirtingly calls Eleanor his “hero.” By the end of the movie, his words have real resonance.
It’s not only women who are given equal treatment in Pearl Harbor. Ewen Bremner plays Red, a soldier who stutters when he gets nervous (an affliction that is used to quite questionable comic effect). Yet he, too, is a hero, as is FDR (played remarkably by Jon Voight), who rises from his wheelchair to inspire his war counselors while bellowing, “Don’t tell me it can’t be done!”
The story of Doris “Dorie” Miller, the black mess cook from Texas played quite charismatically by Cuba Gooding Jr., is grafted into the movie’s narrative to show the African-American contribution to the war effort. A controversial figure, Miller (who has an auditorium in Austin named in his honor) comments in the movie that because of his race all the Navy has allowed him to do is work as a mess attendant. During the Pearl Harbor attack, Miller heroically came to the aid of his mortally wounded captain and then manned an anti-aircraft gun for which he had no formal training. He was officially credited with downing two Japanese planes (although eyewitness reports vary) and was the first African-American to receive the Navy Cross, the Navy’s highest honor. Miller died two years later when a ship he was on sank. In honor of his contributions, Gov. Rick Perry is presenting Miller’s family with a resolution naming him a Texas Hero in a ceremony on the south steps of the State Capitol on Friday, May 25, at 10am.
“My job,” according o Bay, “was to get the essence of events right. It’s not a history lesson.” Although with the 60th anniversary of the attack coming up this December, as well as the opening of the movie on Memorial Day weekend and the full-scale military and ancillary support of the movie, the filmmakers already count on the film to spur popular interest in the actual events, perhaps once again looking to Titanic as a model. Numerous Web sites, National Geographic specials, survivor memories, the DVD release of Tora! Tora! Tora!, and so on, have been prepared in anticipation.
Branches of the military also appear to be expecting recruitment spikes as a result of the movie, which perhaps help explain their heavy involvement in the production of the movie and its spectacular opening gala aboard the high-security Stennis. Bay says he used a line said by Doolittle in the movie to help woo the military’s support of his film effort. “‘We may not win this battle, but we’re going to win this war. How I know is because there’s nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.’ And I used that line constantly with the military. I said, ‘This is the essence of the movie.'” Bruckheimer adds, “The studio has a longstanding relationship with the military, as I do, based on things like Top Gun, Crimson Tide, and Armageddon. So our company has a track record for working with the military. We wouldn’t have made the picture without them.”
Early in the film, while defending hotshot flying stunts, Rafe tells his commander, “It’s reckless to show off, but it’s not reckless if it’s done to inspire the men.” The same might be the bywords for the entire film. Pearl Harbor aims to wow and dazzle, but it also wants to inspire future generations. 
Pearl Harbor opens this Friday, May 25.
This article appears in May 25 • 2001.
