(Credit: Alamy)

War films will always be somewhat contentious. Michael Haneke even disagreed with Steven Spielberg’s carefully researched Schindler’s List, commenting: “The idea of creating entertainment of this […] The mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water, to me is unspeakable.” Thus, when Michael Bay intentionally manipulated events at Pearl Harbor to fit his film of the same name, he was rightly condemned. 

The historical facts of war should not be meddled with in order to portray a filmmaker’s idea of drama. Particularly, when there is no disclosure that what is being created is an allegory ala the masterful Apocalypse Now. This created a huge issue with Bay’s Pearl Harbor which set out to capture a historic moment and twisted not only the narratives therein but also the historical details behind that catastrophic event. 

Since its release, this has since been widely criticised by both Pearl Harbor veterans and Japanese personnel. The controversy is centred around a scene that shows Japanese planes attacking a civilian hospital. However, in truth, Japanese pilots were under strict command to avoid all civilian targets.

Survivors of the attack and Pearl Harbor veterans all recall that even when Japanese fighters had a straight line of attack on the hospital and other civil buildings, they avoided any fire and ceased their attack. Sometimes this was even to the detriment of their safety as they had to manoeuvre onto new paths.

When this was presented to Bay, he simply said that he added the scene to make the attack seem more “barbaric”. As Carl Boggs notes in the New Political Science journal: “Although Pearl Harbor at the time symbolized national defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Japanese, the event has been celebrated in endless ceremonies, rituals, books, TV specials, monuments, and movies, emerging as a defining moment of the ‘good war’ legacy.” In fact, the dialogue, ‘Looks like World War II just started’ is even excitedly exclaimed in the film.

Given that the events of Pearl Harbor were already harrowing enough and the fallout tragically led to a national security fear so rampant that in February 1942, just two months after the attack, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, to make such a truth more “barbaric” for the sake of entertainment is a mindless act of cynical and reprehensible retrospective propaganda. 

Naturally, every war film is just a representation of the occurrences and can’t be relied on as fact. However, while an audience can easily dismiss a love story, personal battle or another storytelling nuance as fiction within the fact, the details themselves should always be true to life so that when it comes to the history, the viewer isn’t being fed a lie.