The Hollywood movie war veterans called insulting: “It’s disgusting to do this”
The war genre has been responsible for many of the greatest movies ever made, and the best examples find Hollywood striking a balance between faithfully recreating and paying tribute to the sacrifices of those involved and creating an immersive cinematic experience for audiences.
It’s a very difficult balance to strike, particularly when survivors of the conflicts in question are still plentiful and capable of passing judgment on accuracy and authenticity. This arguably places even greater pressure on the filmmakers to do justice to harrowing scenarios under the guise of mass-marketed populist entertainment.
In what shouldn’t be a shock to anybody, one director who failed to take that sentiment into consideration was Michael Bay, the bombastic orchestrator of chaotic action sequences and far-fetched blockbuster shenanigans. At the time Pearl Harbor was announced, though, there was a genuine sense of hope and optimism that he was preparing to embark on the next stage of his career.
At the time, Bay’s filmography consisted of Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon, which were firmly within his pyrotechnic wheelhouse. By mounting a lavish war epic that spanned over three hours and revolved around one of the most pivotal moments in American history, it wasn’t insane to imagine he’d show improved growth and maturity when being robbed of his signature silliness.
That didn’t turn out to be the case, with the biggest criticism of Pearl Harbor beyond its insipid central love story the raft of inaccuracies and anachronisms that dogged almost every single one of its 183 minutes. This being Bay, the titular attack was an astonishing extended set piece almost worth the price of admission alone. However, refitting the entire thing into a Ben Affleck/Josh Hartnett/Kate Beckinsale love triangle did not go down well with veterans.
One survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp accused the film of “insulting the guys who defended Pearl Harbor and died,” accusing the production of not only “not giving them the recognition they should receive” but actively “detracting from it”. Another wasn’t interested in beating around the bush, saying that “it’s disgusting to this” when pressed for opinions on Pearl Harbor that were based on his real-life experience.
Ray Emory was another soldier present on that fateful day, and he was firmly in agreement. “There’s a lot of fiction in it, and Pearl Harbour and fiction don’t go together,” he told The Guardian. “It doesn’t make me proud. You’d think that they were the only ones up there that day,” he said of Affleck and Hartnett’s pilot characters.
Pearl Harbor may have come within a whisker of $450million at the box office and won an Academy Award for ‘Best Sound Editing’, but the backlash from those with first-hand accounts of the attack was nothing short of vitriolic. In hindsight, it was ridiculous to expect anything else from Bay.
