Twenty years ago today, minus three days, an attack on American film made its way to VHS and DVD, nearly six months after it first devastated theaters. Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer, masterminds of 1995’s action hit Bad Boys, 1996’s even bigger action hit The Rock, and 1998’s mostly stupid and melodramatic asteroid apocalypse hit Armageddon, came together again to capitalize on World War II’s resurgence in cinema following 1998’s epics Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Toss in the historical romance of 1997’s Titanic and the then-upcoming 60th anniversary of the real-life attack and all the warning signs were there. Pearl Harbor was inevitable.

This movie really sucked. With its tedious romance between an Army fighter pilot “Rafe” (God that name sucks) played by Ben Affleck (with a terrible southern accent) and a nurse played by Kate Beckinsale, plus a love triangle with Rafe’s boyhood best friend and wingman Danny played by Josh Hartnett is fucking unwatchable. It takes at least 90 minutes until the attack actually happens, and even then the action is punctuated by excruciatingly bad acting and dialogue.

Who writes this shit?

Seriously who the fuck writes this? Even if that actually happened in the White House on the day of the attack [Note: it didn’t actually happen. It was completely made up for the movie], why would they include it in the script? Who the hell finds this saccharine bullshit “inspiring”?

Freaking Dan Akroyd playing a Naval intel officer analyzing the warning signs of the imminent Japanese attack was the best character of the movie. Dan Akroyd. The entire first half of the movie could have been about him and it would’ve been downright riveting. And that’s part of the real shame of Pearl Harbor. Bay and Bruckheimer had the production budget and (theoretically) the talent to make an Apollo 13-caliber historical thriller, instead they just turned out this piece of shit whose only redeeming qualities are the action and Dan Akroyd.

Pearl Harbor‘s final act is the 1942 retaliatory Doolittle raid on Japan, an amazing real life feat in which sixteen massive Army B-25 bombers took off from aircraft carriers in the Pacific (carriers designed for one man fighter planes a fraction the size and weight of a B-25), flew 600-plus miles to hit industrial targets in Japan (causing minimal physical damage but inflicting a massive psychological toll on Japanese leadership), and then coasting into occupied China with fumes left in their fuel tanks – many of them crash landing – counting on the locals to help the stranded air crews make a long journey into friendly territory. That really happened.

Not hard to imagine Michael Bay was like “Pfft… That’s nothing. I directed a movie where these oil workers flew a space shuttle to blow up an asteroid the size of Texas to save the world! And in the end they did! It was awesome! Aerosmith even wrote a hit song about it. It’s in the movie!”

https://youtu.be/RWfETQAK19o

Now maybe that all came across as too glib. Angrily bitching about the movie Pearl Harbor on the 80th anniversary of the attack sure is. Anyway, I first saw Saving Private Ryan when I was 14, in the theater, on the day it came out. Don’t ask why, I don’t even know.

I didn’t know shit back then. I did notice in the theater an old man who looked to be in his seventies bursting into tears about 15 minutes in, during the brutal D-Day beach combat scene. And a different old man, his face also red and swollen with tears when we exited the theater.

Don’t know how they felt, I didn’t ask. I can’t help but contrast that display of raw emotion, the gut wrenching pain those men must have felt watching war depicted on screen so viscerally with what Kenneth Taylor, an Army Air Force fighter pilot credited with 3 kills during the attack (jumped into his plane an hour’s sleep after staying up drinking until 6 AM) and the basis for Ben Affleck’s character in the film, thought of the depiction of the attack and the events surrounding it thought of Bay’s movie: “a piece of trash… over-sensationalized and distorted.”

The point is we owe our service members and veterans better, all of us. Steven Spielberg aside, very few of us lazy, non-serving civilians have ever done them sincere, real justice in honoring their sacrifices and willingly facing the very real brutalities of past, present, and future. Buy a drink for a jarhead in a bar, send a care package to a sailor overseas, drop a $50 in the cup of the veteran panhandler on the sidewalk. And forget shit like Pearl Harbor.