Pearl Harbor

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

There's a scene at a military hospital in the aftermath of the Japanese attack that sums up this thrilling but woefully empty movie in all sorts of ways.

Having seen off a few enemy planes, our fly-boy heroes Rafe (Affleck) and Danny (Hartnett) have turned up to help their mutual sweetheart Evelyn (Beckinsale) who's a nurse at a Navy hospital over-ridden by casualties.

They both give blood, and we see their haemoglobin fill the only available containers - two gleaming Coca-Cola bottles.

Crass product-placement from those most Hollywood of Hollywood film-makers, director Bay and producer Jerry Bruickheimer?

Well no, apparently they used the soft drink bottles for just such a purpose in the aftermath of the attack.

The trouble is, the way Bay shoots this and many more scenes - this was a director who cut his teeth on big-budget advertisements - it just looks like a commercial. And the movie itself has all the emotional impact of an endless string of glossy images.

It also serves as a crude metaphor for the whole movie: the blood of history served up in a bottle of pop.

It's a big movie desperate to be loved in the same way Titanic was. And it pours on the sentiment and patriotic fervour right from its opening in Tennessee in 1923, where we meet the two pilots as airplane-crazy kids, all the way to the finale which involves the James Doolittle-led American bombing of Tokyo in 1942.

Certainly the central 40 minutes of the attack, which comes 90 minutes into the film, is spectacular, a Second World War air-to-air and air-to surface battle that echoes everything from Star Wars (as planes dart between ships and hangars), to Titanic (the scenes of the USS Oklahoma rolling over as its crew lose their hold on its deck) and Saving Private Ryan (shots of men in the water being strafed).

So far as being a war movie goes, Pearl Harbor's fireworks deliver all that could be expected of its towering budget.

But, money won't buy you love, or at least give any real heart or heat to the romance between first Rafe and Evelyn, then (after Rafe is posted missing in action during the Battle of Britain where he's joined a squadron of American volunteers) between Evelyn and Danny.

Bay, working from a clunky script by Randall Wallace (who might have written Braveheart but also directed the crummy Man in the Iron Mask) certainly makes his leads look attractive but can't make them more than cut-outs as characters.

And Pearl Harbor so rushes the love story it feels like the movie is merely killing time until the Japanese fleet heads towards Oahu.

While the dialogue for the lead trio comes with many a line that's memorable for all the wrong reasons, the Japanese naval officers planning the attack sound like they've stepped out of an ancient samurai myth. It gives them a strange air of honorability, something that smacks more of an effort to not cause offence in a big cinema market than actually having a point of view about events leading up the attack.

Not that it was ever going to be much of a history lesson. War movies never are, and for 40 minutes this is certainly a state-of-the-art war movie, even if it pulls its punches about the horrors for family consumption.

As a bigger-is-always-better blockbuster, it's hard not to be impressed by Pearl Harbor's sense of scale. But in its attempt to deliver an engaging human story set against a grand historic event, the event is the only thing that leaves a lasting impression.

Take away those two bottles, and you've got one very big, very bloodless movie.

Cast: Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding jun, Alec Baldwin

Director: Michael Bay

Rating: M (medium level violence)

Running time: 183 mins

Screening: Advance screenings tomorrow at Village Queen St. Opens Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas, Thursday