《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. Roosevelt.