#251: Tora! Tora! Tora! vs Pearl Harbor
A dry, plodding retelling or a racist romantic “epic” — choose your fighter
This review was originally posted on Twitter on May 16, 2020.
Tora! Tora! Tora! initial release: September 23, 1970
Director: Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasaku
Pearl Harbor initial release: May 21, 2001
Director: Michael Bay
Every American knows about the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii: on the morning of December 7, 1941, after diplomatic efforts had failed, Japan attacked the United States naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, wreaking a destruction that the United States had rarely seen that wasn’t self-inflicted. The incident is taught in school books, it’s often referred to in terms of discussing the concept of a sneak attack. Some of the dumber among us use it to denigrate the Japanese 80 years after the United States and Japan sorted their differences.
Here, then, are two very different movies about it, both of them typical to their eras, for better or worse.
Let’s start with Tora! Tora! Tora! The 1960s saw several long war epics, i.e. The Longest Day or Battle of Britain. These films often featured big ensemble casts but were short on characterization, preferring to focus, at much as they could, on historical accuracy. Tora! Tora! Tora! is no different. Much like The Longest Day before it, the multiple perspectives (in this case, American and Japanese) are covered by different directors, with their own styles, with the intent of giving a more objective take on what really happened that day. In that regard we get a pretty balanced presentation. The American scenes focus quite a bit on the miscommunications and errors made by the higher-ups in Washington, with special focus on exonerating local commanders who were blamed for the lack of US readiness in Hawaii. While certain scenes later in the film are directed with an eye towards action and intensity, for the most part the cinematography is somewhat workmanlike.
This is in sharp contrast to the Japanese direction, which is more dynamic, with a special talent for more evocative shots. The result is that the first half of the film is a little dry and takes a while to really get going, but once it does, it doesn’t stop. It’s a heavy film that manages, eventually, to be engaging in spite of most of its characters being largely a bunch of talking heads.
Then there’s Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay’s big 2001 film. Michael Bay has made a living blowing things up on film, including Ben Affleck’s career; in a post-Saving Private Ryan world, Pearl Harbor is emotionally manipulative trash with explosions. Where Tora focuses on a dramatization of the maneuverings and politicking in the run-up to December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor focuses on a love triangle between two handsome white pilots and the nurse they both love. In between all this dull-ass cishet romance, the film makes an attempt to mimic the overall structure of Tora, even going so far as to steal a few shots directly from the film, as well as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s infamous, yet apocryphal line about the US being a “sleeping giant.”
Like Tora, Pearl Harbor has a big ensemble cast, including noted sex pest and accused kidtoucher Tom Sizemore who aside from appearing in a lot of war movies also did some unwatchable porn in the mid-00s. We also get Dan Akroyd at the low point of his career and Cuba Gooding Jr. at the high point. We get a lot of stories that mostly don’t weave together; Gooding for example plays Dorie Miller, a black sailor in the heavily segregated Navy who with no training manned an anti-aircraft gun during the attack. (Miller is also portrayed in Tora but it’s a passing scene.) There’s also a lot of focus on President Roosevelt, played by Jon “wish.com Christopher Walken” Voight who makes a lot of eminently quotable speeches but doesn’t really seem to say much that’s actually meaningful. “We’re building refrigerators while our enemies build bombs,” nice jingoism there Frankie. The film is full of awful dialogue like that, and I think that’s kind of the real difference between the two films, stylistic differences notwithstanding: both have very different approaches to dialogue in their scripts, and Pearl Harbor is by far the worse of the two.
Tora’s script is good, if not great; the Japanese side of things in particular stands out, with lines such as “there is no last word in diplomacy.” Pearl Harbor gives us gems(?) like “I think World War 2 just started” and, especially early on, some deeply anachronistic slang. Worse yet, the film runs a staggering three hours. Even the front-heavy Tora only goes for two and a half. The pacing is all off, and most of that is due to the romantic plot, which if it had been lopped off and made into its own film would probably have bombed horribly.
Released 60 years after the attack that triggered the United States’ entry into World War 2, Pearl Harbor was mostly a vehicle for Ben Affleck. It was savaged by critics, and rightly so, but audiences loved it, because we love bad cishet romance and explosions.
Then 9/11 happened.
All of a sudden, the context of the film changed utterly. 9/11 happened shortly before Pearl Harbor’s 60th anniversary; of course people were going to draw parallels, even though the two situations weren’t at all similar beyond being surprise attacks. When Pearl Harbor hit home video shortly after 9/11, DVD sales went through the roof. It soon became a necessary part of school curriculum for a million lazy social studies teachers. It became, for all intents and purposes, post-9/11 propaganda. 9/11 still lurks in the recesses of our minds. It whispers into our ears, telling us to lock up Mexican kids in cages and turn a blind eye to Israel bombing entire cities flat. Films like Pearl Harbor play on our fears, ginning up a narrative of a wounded US against a dastardly, cowardly foreign (and, importantly, non-white) menace.
There’s no way Bay could have predicted 9/11 with Pearl Harbor. There’s a lot of things that came out just before 9/11 that look very different now — my favorite examples are Grant Morrison’s X-Men run and Deus Ex’s in-universe justification for a texture issue hiding the WTC. But that didn’t stop the film from becoming the worst sort of fascist propaganda, cheap, emotionally manipulative, and laden with stark images of endangered white women. Its worst sin, however, is its depiction of a Japanese attack on a navy hospital — a complete fabrication. The Japanese bombers had only military targets in mind; hospitals were not on the list. This depiction is rooted in the kind of racist sentiment that has buried itself in the American psyche since the war; it’s the same mentality that thinks the Fukushima nuclear accident was “karma.” This isn’t the film’s only inaccuracy, either — another one is the subplot about one of the protagonists joining Eagle Squadron fighting the Germans out of England. Enlisted servicemen were forbidden from serving in the squadron, and anyway the Battle of Britain was already over by this point.
So here we are, two very different films about Pearl Harbor, two very different approaches. About the only positive qualities they share are good acting, good music and good dogfights (I think Pearl Harbor wins out on that one, if only for being more technically advanced.) Tora! Tora! Tora! might be the drier of the two films, but its balanced approach far outweighs the manipulative, insulting wash that is Pearl Harbor. And if I’m being honest, I’ll watch anything with Jason Robards in it anyway.
