Pearl Harbor: More or Less.

Finally, and with exceptional historical accuracy for a Hollywood movie, Tora! Tora! Tora! told the story of the attack from the perspective of both the attacker and the attacked. Within the limits of the special effects artistry of 1970, the Twentieth Century Fox epic rendered the actual attack with surprising believability. More important, it provided audiences with a good understanding of why the Japanese embarked upon the attack and what actually happened in the early morning of December 7. Why would the Navy and the Pentagon provide full assistance to a film that portrayed an ignominious defeat? Director Richard Fleischer explained that Tora! Tora! Tora! satisfied the Navy's need to show a successful aircraft carrier operation. It just did not happen to show an American sortie. The movie did lack one crucial ingredient required in any Hollywood feature film: good drama. The characters never came to life, remaining actors simply reading their lines. In working so hard to tell an accurate story and recrea te the actual attack with visual authenticity, the filmmakers forgot Hollywood's prime directive: a movie must entertain to bring audiences into the theater. As a result, Tora! Tora! Tora! succeeded as history, but failed as drama and so did not make money, the goal of all motion pictures. Nevertheless, the film remains one of the few Hollywood epics that can be used to teach the history of a major event.

Why then make Pearl Harbor? Before he began shooting in Hawaii in April 2000, director Michael Bay explained, "You will see what happened at Pearl Harbor like you have never seen it in any other movie. Our goal is to stage the event with utmost realism." He said that he wanted his film to become one "by which all other films are measured," dismissing Tora! Tora! Tora! as "more of a documentary." Perhaps one of the trailers for the movie described it more honestly: "Pearl Harbor is a fictional tale crafted from a kaleidoscope of real life personal experiences of those living through this terrifying tragedy." The operative word remains "fictional." If the movie had retained its original working title, Tennessee, the filmmakers might well have escaped much of the criticism that Pearl Harbor has received from historians, media critics, and Pearl Harbor survivors. Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer could have legitimately said they were simply using the Japanese attack on Hawaii as the stage on which to play out a love story. However, the very title Pearl Harbor implies that audiences will be viewing a reasonably accurate account of what happened on December 7, 1941.

In the face of continuing criticism that they had not done so, Bruckheimer and Bay maintained that they had captured the essence of the story and captured it well. However, "essence" remains a very subjective term that may to conceal a plethora of sins. In the case of Pearl Harbor, the sins include distortions of fact, fabrications of fact, and implausibilities that far exceed the limits of dramatic license. One day, someone may write a book detailing each inaccuracy and explaining the historic reality. Here, a few examples will have to suffice.

Bay acknowledged that he moved up the war message from the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, to Admiral Husband Kimmel from November 27, to after the Japanese attack on December 7, in order to create dramatic irony. In doing so, he has joined, intentionally or otherwise, the crusade to rehabilitate Kimmel's reputation. If Pearl Harbor had accurately portrayed history and Kimmel had received the warning on November 27, then the admiral would legitimately deserve criticism for not being prepared for a possible attack. In Bay's cinematic interpretation, Kimmel becomes the victim of Washington's incompetence in not providing him with sufficient warning of a possible attack.

In the actual attack, Japanese planes torpedoed the Oklahoma before bombers hit the Arizona. In the movie, a Japanese bomb cinematically spirals down on the Arizona, mortally wounding the battleship before torpedoes strike the Oklahoma. The forty-minute sequence, the film's raison d'etre, never rises above the level of a computer video game, with explosions randomly going off among modern destroyers and computer generated warships. Nor do the filmmakers divide the attack into two waves, as actually happened.

Then there is the separation of the cinematic battleships by fifty yards, instead of being moored to railing, as was the case on December 7. Bay ignored history because he liked the visual images of Japanese torpedo planes flying between the ships at deck level. This is not only absurd, but the sequence vitiates the bravery of Done Miller, the first black man to receive the Navy Cross, for manning a machine gun and shooting down two enemy planes. In fact, Miller did not shoot down any planes as was portrayed. He actually shot at the ships across the way, attempting to hit the Japanese planes as they skimmed a few feet above the water.

The portrayal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt lacks credibility entirely, although both Bay and John Voigt, who played the President, claimed to have read widely in order to portray events accurately. FDR smoked using his signature cigarette holder, although the rest of the film remains smoke free. Although the actor claimed he had watched an interview with a butler who had been in the room when Roosevelt received the news of the attack, the filmmakers cannot even get that right. Instead, Bay creates a scene in which FDR receives news of the attack in some huge, unidentified hail rather than in the White House study playing with his stamp collection, which he was actually doing at the time. Moreover, Voigt paraphrases part of the war message to the Congress, even though the actual words would have taken up no more screen time. And of course, FDR never could have levitated out of his wheelchair and stood unaided, as shown in the movie.

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