Pearl Harbor (film)

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Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor DVD.jpg
IMDB Page (external link)
Writer:	Randall Wallace
Starring:	Ben Affleck Josh Hartnett Kate Beckinsale Cuba Gooding, Jr. Jon Voight Alec Baldwin
Director:	Michael Bay
Music by:	{{{music}}}
Distributor:	Buena Vista Pictures
Release Date:	May 21 2001 (USA premiere) (USA)
Runtime:	183 min.
Language:	[[English/Japanese/ French language\|English/Japanese/ French]]
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{{{awards}}}	{{{awards_label}}}

Pearl Harbor is a war film released in the summer of 2001 by Touchstone Pictures. It stars Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, and Cuba Gooding Jr.. It was a dramatic re-imagining of the attack on Pearl Harbor, produced by the team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, who had previously been involved with such summer blockbusters as Armageddon and The Rock. The final section of the movie relates the Doolittle Raid, the first American attack on the Japanese home islands in World War II.

1 Production, Release and Critical Response
2 Historical Inaccuracies
3 Award Nominations
4 References
5 External links

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Production, Release and Critical Response

Pearl Harbor was released Memorial Day weekend in 2001 and was released on DVD to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the attack. Despite its dazzling special effects, the movie received generally poor reviews, many critics dismissing the film as shallow, hackneyed, and historically insensitive, with critic Roger Ebert claiming that "The filmmakers seem to have aimed the film at an audience that may not have heard of Pearl Harbor, or perhaps even of World War Two." The bombastic tone of the film was frequently cited as the polar opposite of the 1998 Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan.

The movie cost approximately $140 million US to produce, earning it the title of the largest approved production budget for a film to that date, and it grossed approximately $200 million in the US market. Nonetheless, this was considered to be a disappointment, due to the accounting methods used to determine the net profit made by motion pictures.

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Historical Inaccuracies

The movie portrays many of the myths of the Pearl Harbor attack as being unambiguously true, such as Doris Miller's exaggerated heroism, and the carelessness or incompetence of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short (subsequent investigations showed that neither of the officers were informed by the Office of Naval Intelligence prior to the attack).

Other inaccuracies or fabrications include:

Battle of Britain Sequences

A four-bladed Supermarine Spitfire is shown during the Battle of Britain in the film; a Spitfire model that was not available until 1942, though the Battle of Britain takes place during 1940.
Ben Affleck's character flies with a Royal Air Force squadron (which used Supermarine Spitfires), but the planes actually featured in the movie bear RF code letters of the No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron and are, in fact, Hawker Hurricanes.
During the Battle of Britain flight sequences, the British spitfires are shown flying in the standard American four-ship formation. The British actually flew in the three-ship or "VIC" formation.

Pearl Harbor Sequences

The USS Arizona Memorial, which straddles the USS Arizona sunk during the battle, can be briefly seen in a pan shot. The Memorial was dedicated in the 1960's.
In the Movie, the USS Arizona was sunk by a Zeke, using a single bomb. However, in World War II, Zekes were unable to fly at such altitudes carrying said bomb. Also, the Zeke was not originally intended for high-level bombing, and as a result, no such Zeke was fitted with bombing equipment (such as "sights" as shown in the movie).
Admiral Kimmel was not on a golf course on the morning of the attack, nor was he notified of the Japanese embassy leaving Washington D.C. prior to the attack. The first official notification of the attack was received by General Short several hours after the attack had ended.
At the time of the attack, the battleships in "Battleship Row" were tied directly together, not spaced 50 yards apart as they were in the movie
Some shots of the USS Hornet show an angle-decked carrier (USS Constellation) instead of a straight-decked carrier. The angled deck was a post-WWII invention.
In the movie, in excess of eleven Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighters were destroyed or downed. In reality, only nine Zero fighters were destroyed by any means (i.e. anti-aircraft guns, planes) in the real bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Japanese aircraft of that period were painted light grey, not green.
The attack began at 6:37 AM on a Sunday, an unlikely time for children to be hiking or playing baseball as depicted in the movie.
Navy Nurse Betty dies during the Pearl Harbor attack, but no Navy Nurses died as a result of enemy action during the entirety of World War II, including the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The ward dresses of the nurses have a different style than the ones Navy Nurses actually wore during WWII and no nurse would have worked with long hair falling freely about her shoulders.
Some of the bombed ships are actually mothballed Spruance-class destroyers, with visible surface-to-air missile tubes. That technology wasn't available until the 1970s.
During the attack on Pearl Harbor in the movie, the P-40N model of the P-40 Warhawk U.S. fighter aircraft is shown. However, the 'N' model of the P-40 was not available to the United States until 1943 though the Pearl Harbor attack takes place during 1941.

Doolittle Raid Sequences

Affleck and Hartnett's characters are shown taking part in the Doolittle bombing raid over Tokyo which, as fighter pilots, they would not have been allowed to participate in.

Misc.

Navy Nurse Betty claims to be 17 years old and that she has cheated with her age to be accepted, but Navy Nurses were required to be Registered Nurses to join the Navy Nurse Corps, which meant three years of prior training and passing a State Board examination, very unlikely qualifications for any seventeen year old. The minimum age to join the Navy Nurse Corps was 22.

Touchstone Pictures official stance on the movie is that "it's a Love Story", and was never meant to be a historical account of the event.

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Award Nominations

At the 2002 Academy Awards, Pearl Harbor was nominated for four awards:

At the 2001 Golden Raspberry Awards Pearl Harbor was nominated for five awards: Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst Screen Couple, Worst Actor, and Worst Sequel or Remake (presumably of the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!)—but lost to Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered in all but the latter category, wherein it lost to Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes.

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