'Pearl Harbor' at Pearl Habor

Is the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor Hollywood's next great Second World War movie after Saving Private Ryan? The next great sinking ship flick after Titanic? Or just a piston-engined Top Gun? RUSSELL BAILLIE attends this week's world premiere.

These days Pearl Harbor doesn't look much like it does in the movie. We know this because right now we are watching Pearl Harbor at Pearl Harbor.

It's a strange experience, though the movie itself - made for $US135 million ($308 million) plus change, the biggest budget for one film ever green-lighted by a single studio - is the least of it.

Two thousand guests have made their way up the red carpet, up the gangplank, up a giant lift and are watching the near-three hour film from a stand erected on the flight deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS John C. Stennis.

To the right of the screen and across the harbour is the USS Arizona Memorial, spot-lit above the sunken hull of the ship which still entombs many of the 1177 of her sailors killed on December 7, 1941, after a Japanese bomb pierced its decks to the ammunition hold.

That killer blow is the film's money shot, showing the ship's destruction from a bomb's-eye view, ending with a spectacular, devastating explosion in a movie that is full of them.

Astern of the memorial is the battleship USS Missouri, where the Japanese surrender was signed.

So between the sunken Arizona and the floating Missouri, America's Second World War has its bookends.

You can find other poignant reminders of the events of 60 years ago at Pearl Harbor and its neighbouring Army bases and airfields. Many marks from the strafing of Japanese Zero fighters remain on base buildings and tarmacs.

The guide from "Home of the Brave" bus tours spins many a riveting yarn about the human events of that "day of infamy" but eventually bores you silly with conspiracy theories about why the US Navy's Pacific Fleet was caught napping by the Japanese.

The carrier bash starts with Disney chairman Dick Cook introducing the frontline cast, including the poster trio of Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett, director Michael Bay, producer Jerry Bruckheimer as well as visiting dignitaries (former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen and most of the Pentagon's Pacific branch).

And before the screen descends, country-pop singer Faith Hill renders the Star Spangled Banner, the anthem's "rockets red glare" coming with firework accompaniment.

After the end credits have rolled, Pearl Harbor survivors, nurses and veterans of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (a recreation of which constitutes the movie's gung-ho final act) are assembled on stage and get the biggest applause of the night.

There are more fireworks and almost every song of rampant American patriotism ever written, delivered as an interminable choral medley backed by the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.

It's quite a show: all part of a media launch estimated to cost $US5 million ($11 million-plus) and attracting more than 800 journalists and news crews (three-quarters from the mainland, the balance from the rest of the globe, including Japan).

As the Pearl Harbor sky is again swathed in smoke, the sight of the stark, white memorial bathed in Disney's fireworks is an image that sums up this surreal evening - and perhaps the movie.

"You want to kick off the event with some emotion," understates producer Bruckheimer during press interviews earlier in the day about the outlandish scale of the hoopla.

"The fact that you have the survivors here, and you can see the beginning of the war, then the end - because the Missouri is where they signed the peace agreement - I think it has more resonance as far as this movie is concerned."

Bruckheimer, who resembles a diminutive, quietly spoken Richard Branson, is synonymous with Hollywood's flashest, fastest, most jackhammer-like movies of the past two decades.

His flicks about American men in uniform include Top Gun and Crimson Tide. Recently, his films with director Bay, whom he first hired to direct a music video for the racing-car flick Days of Thunder, have kept him in the box-office big league. Pearl Harbor is their fourth film together after Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon.

Making a film about Pearl Harbor was first mooted at an idea-pitching session for Bay. A Disney executive suggested a film on the attack, which had been caught on celluloid in the classic From Here to Eternity and the impersonal near-docudrama Tora, Tora, Tora.

Bay got to work creating shots while Randall Wallace (Braveheart) was hired to work up a script. His story is a love triangle about a pair of boyhood friends (Affleck and newcomer Hartnett) who become fighter pilots, fall for the same woman (Beckinsale, who plays a Navy nurse), become the only American airmen to get aloft during the attack, then later take part in the Doolittle raid.

The Pearl Harbor attack takes up the central 40 minutes of the movie with swarms of Japanese planes wreaking havoc. Its depiction includes the sinking of the Arizona and the capsizing of the USS Oklahoma, which Bay filmed in the same Mexican tank facility that James Cameron used for Titanic.

The finished film employs a spectacular mix of live action involving vintage aircraft and decommissioned naval ships mixed with 150 computer-generated shots. The initial budget for all that was $US200 million ($456 million).

"I didn't want to be responsible for a movie that expensive," says Bay, a tall, all-American guy of wavy-hair and ageing surfer dude looks, whose relaxed demeanour belies his reputation as a hard taskmaster on the set. "A Pattonesque leader," quips Affleck.

Agreeing on the film's budget turned into a series of stand-offs between Disney versus Bay and Bruckheimer. It was shaved down all the way to $US135 million ($308 million), with the pair responsible for any cost over-runs. Those amounted to $US210,000 ($479,230).

"I have no problems with Disney," says Bay the afternoon before the lavish launch. "That's just business."

But Pearl Harbor isn't, of course, just business. It's history made into a screen epic by two film-makers who haven't touched anything real before and whose previous testosterone-soaked action films suggest that it's maybe not a good idea that they do.

Could it be, after all those button-pushing popcorn sellers, Bruckheimer and Bay are trying to something meaningful? Bruckheimer: "No, I just think we are trying to make entertainment and this just happens to be about a real event. And we have to honour the real event and the survivors.

"It is a much more serious subject matter but any time you specifically try to [do something meaningful] you get into trouble. That was never my intention. It's like going around saying this picture is historically accurate. We couldn't do that, the movie would take 10 hours. It's not a documentary."

Bay says the movie became really personal because of his meetings with the Pearl Harbor survivors while he was researching.

Affleck, who was in Armageddon and has described the experience as very traumatising, didn't sign on to just be in another Bruckheimer-Bay blockbuster. "I wouldn't have done it if I thought I was signing up to the sequel to Armageddon with just different flying machines.

"It's quite a departure from what those guys have done in the past, in that they wanted to make a resonant, more affecting movie than just a roller-coaster ride, typical popcorn movie.

"That ambition for them to do that - particularly guys who have been so, so, so successful commercially - really struck me and impressed me. So that's why I signed up. For nothing."

Well, not exactly nothing. He reportedly pocketed $US250,000 ($570,000) before the box-office receipts come in. Still, that's not much money up front to have your name alone on top of a poster for this movie.

"Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. The movie does well, you know ... and if it fails I will rightly take part of the blame."

For Beckinsale, this could well prove the 27-year-old English actress' big break into the A-list. "People have asked me, 'Are you prepared for everything?' I am, honestly, not. I don't know really what to expect. I am just glad that 90 per cent of my life is about potty-training and the real things in life with my 2-year-old daughter. You can't really go crazy when you have to go home and do bath time."

The casting of the relatively unknown Brit brings with it another comparison point to Titanic, but Bay dismisses any connections.

"I think this movie is a very different movie to Titanic. I mean, they sunk a ship. We are sinking a bunch of ships. Epic movies have been around for a very long time."

Beckinsale: "Their love story was a lot more linear than ours. Ours had three people in it so they are not, in fact, very similar, but I am sure they will invite comparisons just because it seems big and have some water. And a Kate."

And being about the opening chapter of America's Second World War, it's effectively another tribute - after Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan - to the now disappearing generation who fought the Second World War.


But despite its explosiveness, Pearl Harbor certainly isn't as grim as the realistic D-Day carnage of Ryan. A hazy-lens effect is used in hospital scenes as Beckinsale and fellow nurses are overwhelmed with casualties. Likewise, those caught on the ground in strafing by Japanese planes disappear bloodlessly into clouds of dust.

It looks as if Bruckheimer and Bay's commercial instincts to make a PG movie about the deaths of 3000-plus people have over-ridden a realistic depiction of events.

Should war movies in this day and age be this restrained in showing the horrors? "War is hell and you have to show that realistically," replies Bay, "I didn't want to make war fake but the trade-off is more kids will be able see this movie. In this movie you actually feel the violence but you aren't actually seeing everything. It's a fine line."

There are other issues that Peal Harbor raises: if the US Navy is happy to let its base, personnel and a fleet of decommissioned ships be used for the film, isn't that because they see it as good PR, as much of a recruitment poster as Top Gun was in the 80s?

Affleck: "It's more complicated. I certainly never felt we wanted to do a recruiting film for the US Army or Navy.

"But by the same token my view of this movie is that every veteran of the Second World War I've talked to told me that it was an awful violent, savage, vicious, brutal, terrible thing and they would never ever want anyone to have to go through that again.

"And I hope that if the military is happy with that, they're happy with that representation because they want people to appreciate how hideous it is to have to fight a war and they want people to appreciate the sacrifices that the veterans of foreign wars made."

Bay: "When we asked the Navy to help us on this movie, this was their darkest day. This was the biggest loss of life on military ships they've ever had. I think its very brave of the Navy to show them losing so horrifically."

On the other side is the question of Japanese feelings about the film, perhaps heightened by the sinking of the fishing boat Ehime Maru by the USS Greeneville off Oahu in February.

In Hawaii the morning after the premiere, the Honolulu Advertiser quoted John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, expressing worries that the movie might create an anti-Asian backlash.

Bay says the movie doesn't demonise the Japanese and points to a scene - based on an anecdote - where a Japanese tail gunner in a low-flying torpedo bomber is seen shooing Hawaiian kids on the ground away, effectively telling them to shelter from the attack.

So how might the film go in Japan, where the posters downplay the attack and instead have Affleck and Beckinsale in a close embrace? "I think if they hook into the love story they will be fine," says Bruckheimer.

The movie will undoubtedly tap into a depth of feeling in American about the attack and how it brought the US into the Second World War, especially with its predictably huge opening during America's Memorial Weekend. But might its very American-ness be its undoing in foreign parts?

As one of the few non-Americans in Pearl Harbor's frontline, Beckinsale defends the movie's flag-waving.

"It was a world war and I think making a film about it from any country's perspective is valid. I don't have a problem with that. I don't think you have to be French to enjoy a French movie."

Affleck: "I hope international audiences will understand that it's not a chauvinistic view of the Second World War or that the people in the United States were the only ones who suffered."

But why should we care, coming from one of those countries for whom the Second World War was six years rather than four?

Bay: "Why should you care? This is a universal story about tragedy. It's not just about how it happened to us. It also shows that generation was a different generation. They were a generation that would step forward and put their country before themselves and it was a different time. This is a very American story but it's also a universal story."

Bruckheimer: "It's a love story. If you don't get hooked into the characters it doesn't matter. Even for American audiences it's not about Pearl Harbor, it's about those characters. How it changed their lives. If we don't get you hooked into those characters it's not going to do business anywhere."

* Pearl Harbor opens in New Zealand on June 7. It will be reviewed in TimeOut next week.