XI. Render the articles

A. Hollywood’s «Pearl Harbor»

Since its inception, director Michael Bay’s World War II epic has lived larger than life. But will historians like it — and will the world’s moviegoers?

Let the explosions begin. As Hollywood’s latest attempt at a global blockbuster, “Pearl Harbor”, reaches screens around the world this summer, critics and historians will surely debate whether the film sanitizes the role of the Japanese and obscures the preparedness of U.S. Navy commanders that fateful December morning in 1941. But first things first: is the movie any good?

When in comes to the money sequence – the Japanese bombs wreaking havoc on the U.s. fleet that fateful morning – the Disney epic delivers. Ninety minutes into this massive movie the attack commences, and the spectacular images come hurtling like fireballs. This is, let’s be honest, what we’re here for, and what most Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movies serve up best: the poetry of destruction. Fighter planes swoop between buildings like something out of “Star Wars.” A battleship flips sideways in the Hawaiian harbor, the crew clutching to the edge like something out of “Titanic.” Drawing soldiers are shot underwater, enemy bullets strafing the ocean like something out of “Saving Private Ryan.”

Violent and thrilling these images go directly to your central nervous system. But Michael Bay isn’t making a movie about war’s horror. It’s more like a roller-coaster ride. Nor it is really a movie about history: if you want to know the step-by-step events that led up to Dec. 7, 1941, rent the turgid, impersonal “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

“Pearl Harbor,” which sets the Japanese attack in the heart of a two-guys-and-a-gal love story, is above all a movie about its own movieness. From its prologue in Tennessee in 1923, where the two fly boy heroes (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) are introduced as airplane-obsessed kids, to its climax after the James Doolittle-led bombing of Tokyo in 1942, everything is larger, louder, more picture-perfect than life. Hollywood movies don’t get more Hollywood than “Pearl Harbor.”

There is a price to be paid for so much cinematic self-consciousness. An air of unreality hang over most every scene. Bay approached the romance between fighter pilot Rafe (Affeck) and volunteer nurse Evelyn (Kate Backinsale) with the same powkabang! cartoon energy he brought to “Armageddon.” He doesn’t let his scenes breathe, and they cone off filing both fussy and truncated. The first hour of “Pearl Harbor” looks like a highlight reed – a trailer for itself.

The three leads are all appealing, and they’re lit for maximum glamour. But as written by Randall Wallace, Rafe, Danny (Hartnett) and Evelyn are just templates waiting to be filled by a movie star. Who is this pretty, brave nurse whom both men full in love with? What did she do before the war? Almost every line of dialogue sounds like it came from an old movie.

In England, Rafe’s plane is short down. Back in Hawaii, Danny brings the bad news to Evelyn. You can guess what happens next. After mourning briefly, Danny and Evelyn make love in the airfield hangar, their perfect bodies artfully draped in designer parachutes. Surely I’m not spoiling and surprises by revealing that Rafe is not, in fact, dead. Astonishingly, Bay bungles Rafe’s dramatic reappearance, rushing through it so hastily in has no emotional impact.

The bombing comes not a moment too soon, and for 40 minutes the movie dazzles us with fireworks. Once America enters the war, the tone shifts to flag-waving. FDR, cleverly impersonated by Jon Voight, is treated so reverently you almost expect a halo to crown his head.

“Titanic” showed how hungry world was for old-fashioned, epic love stories, and grandiloquently kitschy “Pearl Harbor” is strenuously aimed at the same audience. But will Bay’s postmodern artifice tug the heartstrings as James Cameron’s sturdily classical movie did? Only once did I get a lump in may throat. But what me critics say may not matter. Superbly marketed, “Pearl Harbor” is the very model of a modern blockbuster. Will it matter that almost nothing about its human drama rings true?

By David Ansen, Newsweek

(June 4, 2001)

B. A “RING” TO RULE THE SCREEN

Peter Jackson’s fierce, imaginative movie takes high-flying risks and inspires with its power and scale

First, let me tell you where I’m coming from. Before I saw “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” I didn’t know the difference between an orc and an elf, or what Middle-earth was in the middle of. This review is coming to you from a Tolkien-free zone. I went into Peter Jackson’s movie – the first of a trilogy – with no preconceptions. I came out, three hours later, sorry I’d have to wait a year to see what happens next in Frodo Baggins’s battle against the Dark Lord, Sauron, and thinking a trip to the bookstore to pick up “The Two Towers” might be in order.

The movie works. It has real passion, real terror, and a tactile sense of evil that is missing in that other current movie dealing with wizards, wonders and wickedness. Jackson’s fierce, headlong movie takes high-flying risks: it wears its earnestness, and its heart, on its muddy, blood-streaked sleeve. The actors look deep into each other’s eyes and swear oaths in quasi-Shakespearean language that could, were is not for the utter conviction with which it is played, topple over into the ludicrous.

After a dark and stormy prologue than explains the history of the ring, we meet our hero (Elijah Wood), and his mentor, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), in bucolic Hobbiton. This first half hour is shaky: you might feel you’ve been dragged to a Renaissance Faire where diminutive hobbits cavort with less than contagious jollity. One-hundred-eleven-year-old Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm), the current possessor of Sauron’s ring, passes in on to Frodo and unknowingly puts the boy’s life in danger.

Tolkien’s mythic tale is both very simple and very intricate: in order to save the world from evil, Frodo must return the ring to the fires of Mount Doom where it was forget – for only there can it be destroyed. To accomplish this, he must form a coalition among the races off Middle-earth – elves, dwarfs, hobbits, wizards and humans – to battle the armies of the Dark Lord. (Is there an echo here of our current world? If you fear it, it lends this war movie an extra urgency.) With his multispecies band of nine brouthers – the Fellowship – Frodo sets out to the land of Mordor.

Jackson’s imagination quickens at the scent of evil, anyone who has seen his lurid horror-comedy “Dead Alive” or “Heavenly Creatures” knows. “Fellowship” takes hold as soon as the spectral Black Riders appear, hot in pursuit of Frodo and his three hobbit pals. Soon, there are festering-faces orcs, brutal urik hai warriors an a deadly cave troll in the mines of Moria. Jackson’s camera files like a hawk, swooping and plunging into breathtaking scenes of blood and destruction.

For the film’s design, Jackson turned to Tolkien book illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe. The depictions of the landscapes, architecture and creatures of evil is stunning. But when it comes to the depiction of the good, the movie lapses into art nouveau kitsch. Cate Blanchett’s appearance as a golden-locked elven queen is like pre-Raphaelite calendar art. The elven city of Rivendell runs to Ye Olde Antique Shoppe. Jackson isn’t the first artist to be more inspired by darkness than light.

With his preternaturally wide eyes, his strong neck and his dirt-caked fingernails, Woods makes an ideal hobbit hero, and once ethereal, determined and funky. Jackson keeps his movie rooted in the earth – you can almost smell the damp forests. Two of the most passionate performances come from Viggo Mortensen as the courageous Aradorn and Sean Bean as the conflicted warrior Boromir. McKellen is a playfully magisterial Gandalf, and he is pitted against no less a foe than Christopher Lee as wizard turned bad Saruman.

This is a violent movie – too violent to little ones – and there are moments more “Matrix” than medieval. Yet it transcends cheap thrills; we root for the survival of our heroes with a depth of feeling than may come as a surprise. The movie keeps drawing you in deeper. Unlike so many overcooked action movies these days, “Fellowship” doesn’t entertain you into a stupor. It leaves you with your wits intact, hungry for more.

By David Ansen, Newsweek

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