The Oscar-winning war movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Why do the filmmakers think we want to see this?”
Roger Ebert wasn’t hard to please. Although he certainly didn’t love every single movie he reviewed, he didn’t go out of his way to be nasty, either. He was, first and foremost, a champion of cinema. While other critics like Pauline Kael often seemed to be playing defence against filmmakers for no apparent reason, Ebert seemed to relish the opportunity to lavish a new movie or an up-and-coming director with praise. He even loved movies that a lot of film snobs would cringe at. He somehow genuinely adored Garfield 2 and was practically glowing about Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Anyone who has read a handful of his reviews, however, knows that the man could be pretty darn caustic when he didn’t like a film. He was a witty writer, and that meant that he could land a barb when he wanted to. Such was the case with a 2001 movie that you could call a classic or a dumpster fire, or a classic dumpster fire, which remains weirdly prominent in the annals of film history.
Any time Michael Bay makes a movie, it’s a kind of cinematic red flag. His films are like the Hallmark Channel for people who listen to Joe Rogan: glossy, profoundly American in the purely fictional sense, and performatively masculine. Whether he’s getting artsy with a slow pan up a woman’s legs or lingering with languid eroticism on a gently rippling American flag, he is a man of consistency, and we fear him for it.
There was nothing out of the ordinary with 2001’s Pearl Harbour. As its title so eloquently suggests, it is about the bombing of the Hawaiian harbour that kicked off America’s entry into World War II. It centres on a love triangle between three outrageously attractive movie stars—Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, and Josh Hartnett—and takes a few pitiful stabs at history along the way.
Ebert opened his one-and-a-half-star review with a now iconic sentence: “Pearl Harbour is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours about how, on December 7th, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.” He lambasted its simplistic and inaccurate version of history, lamented its interminable 40-minute CGI centrepiece, and questioned how a film about the Japanese attack could be so devoid of Japanese characters.
He was especially irritated at how positive the movie tried to be about the whole thing. “How can it be entertaining or moving when it’s simply about the most appalling slaughter?” he queried. “Why do the filmmakers think we want to see this, unrelieved by intelligence, viewpoint or insight?”
Sadly, the filmmakers had a lower opinion of the audience than Ebert did, and their views turned out to be justified. Pearl Harbour somehow made nearly $450million at the box office and earned a staggering four Oscar nominations. Not surprisingly, they were all for technical categories aside from Diane Warren’s nomination for ‘Best Original Song’ for ‘There You’ll Be’. It won for ‘Best Sound Editing’, a distinction it would only have earned if it had edited out most of the dialogue.
