The Day the World Shattered

“Pearl Harbor” has a superb reenactment of Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of a sizable portion of the U.S. Pacific fleet in Honolulu, an engaging love story and a remarkable evocation of a time when Americans virtually overnight pulled together to begin the grueling process of turning a military catastrophe into eventual triumph.

The film’s immense cast and crew, headed by director Michael Bay, writer Randall Wallace and stars Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale, blend artistry and technology to create a blockbuster entertainment that has passion, valor and tremendous action. Its combination of authentic aircraft and ships, stunt work and special effects re-creates the bombing in all its precise ferocity and immense scale. And despite its scale, “Pearl Harbor” has a brisk pace that makes this three-hour war epic seem like half that time.

The film is sustained by a grand theme: innocence lost. It suggests that the innocence that fired the unhesitating bravery and self-sacrifice of the American people, in battle as well as the home front, carried with it an ignorance that allowed the U.S. to underestimate Japan’s military power and determination.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s admission of the mistake of “regarding the enemy as inferior” carries with it an implied acknowledgment of racist attitudes many Americans held toward the Japanese at that time. It’s the same innocence that allows Affleck’s Rafe to be crushed to discover that, after he is reported killed in action, his best friend Danny (Hartnett) and his fiancee, Evelyn (Beckinsale), a Navy nurse, have fallen in love.

The filmmakers’ perspective of six decades recognizes that the stirring words of FDR and Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle could be spoken unself-consciously and that patriotism was a matter of unabashed pride. The passing of time also frees the filmmakers from the jingoism so characteristic of so many Hollywood World War II movies. “Pearl Harbor” leaves the impression that America paid for victory in a loss of innocence that was inevitable, an invaluable lesson that we are always in the process of learning.

“Pearl Harbor” is also self-aware and honest in its heart-tugging. It takes us back to a simpler time, when ordinary people were more sharing than competitive, a time when American society, for all its inequities and injustices, was for many people a time of less loneliness, alienation, self-absorption and cynicism. This makes “Pearl Harbor” especially moving for those of us old enough to have heard FDR proclaim Dec. 7 “a date which will live in infamy,” even if we were in kindergarten at the time.

The first of the film’s deft touches occurs right at the start. Young Danny and Rafe are Tennessee farm boys back in 1923 and caught up in fantasies of World War I aerial warfare. They get Danny’s father’s crop duster moving, if not airborne, but he (William Fichtner) is not merely terrified of what might happen to the boys or his biplane, but as a World War I vet, regards their fantasies of war with horror.

But as young men Danny and Rafe remain consumed with flying and volunteer for the U.S. Army Air Force well before Pearl Harbor. In early 1941 in New York City, the brash Rafe volunteers to fly in the Eagle Squadron during the Battle of Britain. Evelyn and Danny are sent to Honolulu, with Rafe arriving there, much to their surprise, on Dec. 5.

Colm Feore’s Adm. Kimmel and others in command at Pearl Harbor are alarmed at the apparent disappearance of the Japanese fleet, and Kimmel’s cryptologist (Dan Aykroyd) feels certain that the Japanese are heading for Pearl Harbor instead of the Philippines or the South Seas, but he hasn’t quite cracked the Japanese code.

The Americans have cut off Japan’s oil supplies, and Adm. Yamamoto (Mako), a famously reluctant but brilliant Harvard-educated warrior, sees no course but to launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, where more than 100 ships, about half the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet, were anchored. At 7:55 on a Sunday morning, the Japanese unleashed 183 planes aimed not only at the ships in Pearl Harbor but at all military installations on Oahu.

Bay, cinematographer John Schwartzman and their crew convey the swiftness and the vast scope of the attack; they give us the tremendous scale of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with special focus on the fate of the USS Arizona, which exploded and quickly sank. Of the 1,514 men aboard 1,177 lost their lives, 900 trapped in the vessel, never to be recovered.

At the time of the attack sequence, we have already met Cuba Gooding Jr.’s real-life Dorie Miller, who as a black man in the segregated U.S. armed services of the time was confined to cooking in the USS Arizona’s galley--but who gets his chance to be a gunner more swiftly than he could have ever imagined. Bay suggests the magnitude and horror of the attack without lingering on images of hideous suffering to the point of morbidity.

But “Pearl Harbor” does not end on a note of disaster and disarray; instead, Roosevelt rallies America and its armed forces by sending Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) to lead a bold retaliatory bombing run over Tokyo.

While the roles of Rafe and Danny could have been given more individuality, they are clean-cut, all-American archetypes of the era and have been given contrasting temperaments. For Affleck, “Pearl Harbor” is a confirmation of his stardom. For Hartnett, it’s a coming of age; like Beckinsale, Hartnett has risen fast with solid performances.

Gooding, Baldwin and Jon Voight as FDR head a huge cast that includes Tom Sizemore and Scott Wilson, among other standouts.

Special-effects coordinator John Frazier and set coordinator Jim Schwalm spent a month rigging the fleet for its destruction. Aerial coordinator Alan Purwin and his crew staged some of the most ferocious, exciting aerial combats ever filmed--over Tokyo and Britain as well as Oahu. Production designer Nigel Phelps and costume designer Michael Kaplan evoke the period in a wide range of locales meticulously but without exaggerating fads of the era. Hans Zimmer’s score is rightly stately and soaring.

Bay, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the entire cast and crew have given us a “Pearl Harbor” to remember.

*

MPAA-rated: PG-13 for sustained intense war sequences, images of wounded, brief sensuality and some language. Times guidelines: The war sequences are too intense for young children.

‘Pearl Harbor’

Ben Affleck: Rafe McCawley

Josh Hartnett: Danny Walker

Kate Beckinsale: Evelyn Johnson

Cuba Gooding Jr.: Dorie Miller

Tom Sizemore: Earl

Jon Voight: President Roosevelt

Alec Baldwin: Lt. Col. James Doolittle

A Buena Vista release of a Touchstone Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films production. Director Michael Bay. Producers Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay. Executive producers Mike Stenson, Harry Wladman, Randall Wallace, Chad Oman, Bruce Hendricks. Screenplay by Randall Wallace. Cinematographer John Schwartzman. 2nd unit director/Visual effects supervisor. Editors Chris Lebenzon, Steven Rosenblum, Mark Goldblatt. Music Hans Zimmer. Costumes Michael Kaplan. Production designer Nigel Phelps. Art directors Jon Billington, William Ladd Skinner. Set designers Aric Lasher, Luis G. Hoyos, Stan Tropp, William Hawkins, Dean F. Wolcott. Set decorator Jennifer Williams. Running time 3 hours, 3 minutes.

In general release.