Disney does Pearl Harbour

For just a moment, it looked like 1941 all over again. There, in the moody grey skies above Honolulu, a pair of Japanese Zeros were screaming in towards Ford Island in the heart of Pearl Harbour. And then — boom! — a deafening explosion lit up the afternoon with wild streaks of orange and burning gold.

Right at the spot where the United States' finest battleships exploded almost 60 years ago, another line of ships was coughing and choking beneath the thick black fumes.

Of course, it wasn't really the Japanese returning to the scene of America's most humiliating military defeat. It was the Walt Disney Company, which might be attacked in some quarters as a pernicious threat to Western civilisation, albeit of a different kind, but at least had the good grace to use dummy bombs and blanks.

The tourists were not leaping off their sunmats on Waikiki beach, safely tucked away on the other side of Honolulu.

Disney's latest blockbuster movie is Pearl Harbour, a melodramatic tale of love and betrayal set against the backdrop of the day that, in President Roosevelt's celebrated words, "will live in infamy." The producers say they want to come up with something that rolls Titanic and Saving Private Ryan into one, something that combines scrupulous historical reconstruction of a major disaster with a graphically realistic visualisation of the horrors of war.

They have entered sensitive territory, however — an "emotional open wound," as the words of the official Pentagon consultant on the film, Jack Green, puts it.

Blowing up Pearl Harbour all over again is not an enterprise that can be taken on lightly, and a number of veterans, historians and military experts remain to be convinced that the film-makers can get it right.

It does not help that the producer of the film — at $US135 million ($300 million), one of the highest-budget movies of all time — is Jerry Bruckheimer, the maestro of the inane action blockbuster, whose last outing with Pearl Harbour's director, Michael Bay, was the loud, crass, utterly unsubtle asteroid disaster picture, Armageddon.

The question veterans want answered is whether this film will replicate Saving Private Ryan's scrupulous reconstruction of the reality of warfare, or whether it merely aspires to match the Spielberg film's box-office receipts. The signs, after two weeks of filming, are not altogether encouraging.

The script, by Randall Wallace, the man who wrote Braveheart, has been described by people who have seen a version of it as being "contrived," weighed down by banal dialogue and having "all the resonance and depth of a comic strip." One lengthy analysis on the Internet talks of "scenes of embarrassingly bad exposition worthy of the lamest of soap operas."

In Hawaii, military buffs have responded to Disney's pledge to be as accurate as possible by watching every minute of the filming through binoculars and finding fault with everything from the camouflage paint on the Japanese Zeros to the depiction of the planes gunning after cars frantically seeking to escape the scene of the attack (historically, this did not happen).

Green acknowledged he had found numerous errors of fact, military language and characterisation of the principal commanders and said he had tried to persuade Disney to make changes accordingly. The resident historian at the main memorial to the dead of Pearl Harbour, Daniel Martinez, said he too had had plenty to say about the script when he read it, although for reasons of confidentiality he was not at liberty to say what his reservations were.

Across the country, veterans of Pearl Harbour have expressed misgivings about the project. One group in Texas objected to a vintage US warship, the Lexington, being dressed up as a Japanese vessel. Another group based in Hawaii complained about letting a fictional love story intrude on the overwhelming tragedy of Pearl Harbour.

To its credit, Disney appears to have gone some way to address the sensitivities. The veteran British writing team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (of Dad's Army fame) have been hired to polish up the military dialogue. The character of Admiral Kimmel, who notoriously played golf while the Japanese attack on his base was being hatched, has been modified to make him more of a tragic figure, a workaholic tripped up by bad luck, rather than an incompetent fool.

Before filming began, the producers, director, cast — which includes Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale — and crew attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the burial site of the USS Arizona, the ship where almost half of the 2400 American victims of the Japanese raid perished after a bomb struck its forward ammunition supplies and triggered a huge explosion.

The producers have taken pains not to fly any planes over the Arizona memorial and have done nothing to prevent the thousands of daily visitors from paying homage to the dead of December 7, 1941.

The noise of filming a few hundred metres away did not impinge on the serenity of the floating memorial bridge over the sunken remains of the battleship-turned-graveyard.

The pitfalls of the project, however, are enormous. Pearl Harbour still attracts impassioned debate today, with right-wing conspiracy theorists convinced that Roosevelt "allowed" the Japanese to bomb the naval fleet stationed there so that public opinion would sanction America's long-debated entry into the Second World War. There are strong feelings, too, in Hawaii, which saw its sense of security evaporate overnight and never had its suffering recognised properly.

Young people have turned up in large numbers to watch filming, on Ford Island and at its other locations on the island of Oahu. When a stunt pilot clipped a palm tree and crashed, writing off his plane and suffering minor injuries, there were no lack of amateur video hounds willing to sell their footage to the national news and entertainment networks.

But those old enough to remember December 1941 have been conspicuously silent.

Their reactions won't be properly gauged until the film comes out in the middle of 2001. Some of their dismay no doubt stems from reports of the film's storyline, which pits two childhood friends (Affleck and Josh Hartnett) as rivals for the affections of a Navy nurse (Beckinsale). Aff-leck's character charges off to Europe to help the British fight the Nazis, and is feared dead. By the time he turns up in Pearl Harbour, he finds his girlfriend and his best friend romantically involved.

The Japanese raid turns their lives upside down, and the two rivals end up joining the so-called Doolittle raid, a near-suicidal air attack on Tokyo undertaken to avenge Pearl Harbour. One can imagine the blend of derring-do and true love conquering all with which the film concludes.

"To be fair to Disney, this is entertainment, not a documentary," conceded Martinez, the historian at the Arizona memorial. Although he wouldn't discuss it, his distaste was plain to see ("Talk to me in a year and I'll be glad to tell you a few things.") Meanwhile, just a few hundred yards from his office, stuntmen in fireproof clothing were jumping into the water with flames leaping out of their backs while mock-ups of American P-40 planes exploded all around.

An underwater crew was on hand, Saving Private Ryan-style, to capture the mayhem from beneath the surface of the harbour waters.

Was this a respectful reconstruction, or an excuse for overgrown adolescents to play with some extremely sophisticated and expensive toys? We'll have to wait until next summer to find out.

— INDEPENDENT