Pearl Harbor - Director's Cut

By Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University.

Fashioned more as a piece of escapism than any sort of realistic historical document, Michael Bay's orgiastic Pearl Harbor is an assault upon the senses and an insult to its subject matter. Here, in an unnecessary director's cut, Bay has restored some excised blood and gore from the film's centerpiece: the electric, CGI attack by the Japanese upon the Hawaiian base. All of the filmmakers' attention has been lavished upon the effects, leaving little room for any tangible bits of narrative.

Pearl Harbor resembles another film that took extreme license with an important historical event: James Cameron's Titanic (a film whose impact may have started an unnerving trend towards plopping flimsy love stories in the midst of period pieces). Unlike that film, Pearl Harbor has no sense of emotion or dramatic purpose. That's a pretty large handicap for a film about such a tragic event.

Still, the DVD extras presented here are pretty impressive, including documentaries, interactive scene editing, multiple commentary tracks, even reproductions of the film's "lobby cards". It would be nice to see this kind of attention paid to a film such as From Here to Eternity, a film that much more effectively dealt with this subject.