Pearl Harbor Bombs

...The money shot in mainstream action movies is achieved A contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post...

...Ben and Josh do manage to shoot down some enemy planes—but that comes after the damage has been done (although the film suggests that their entry into the battle is what convinces the Japanese to go home, thus turning defeat into victory...

...That's why Pearl Harbor is as obscene as porn videos that feature a real, live money shot...

...through the magic of special effects, but the intent is the same: To cause the watcher to gasp and shudder...

...Fuji...

...Securing the money shot for a highbudget action film has become a Hollywood obsession ever since the first commercial for Independence Day ran during the Super Bowl in 1996...

...Bay surely intends to make a point here about how war disrupts civilian life, but it actually looks like our heroes are on their way to blow up a high-school production of The Mikado...

...We see the bombers as they fly over a tableau lifted from Ronald Reagan's "It's Morning in America" commercials in 1984—three boy scouts in a tent, a woman hanging laundry on a clothesline, a Little League game (at 8 in the morning...

...There's about fifteen minutes left of this travesty, which finally resolves its love triangle by killing off one of the two boys, in a hilarious recapitulation of the movie's opening scene...

...Kate tells Ben that she's having Josh's baby...

...ships are, what they do, or what the Japanese battle plan is...

...Later, the great flying ace Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) looks over his squadron and says, "I think we're going to win this war, and you know why...

...I am not exaggerating when I say it may have the worst screenplay ever written...

...One morning, Kate vomits in the bathroom...

...For some bizarre reason, Pearl Harbor is a movie about pilots, not seamen, and only one major character suffers even an injury in the attack...

...In Hawaii, Kate pines for Ben...

...And when Pearl Harbor is not obscene, it's almost unbelievably stupid...

...It's Ben...

...Pearl Harbor reduces a world-changing event to a noisy computer simulation...

...Then we see Josh come to give Kate the bad news...

...It's the way-coolest depiction of the destruction of 2,273 soldiers and sailors and much of America's Pacific fleet you will ever see...

...He has a nice butt," she tells her tittering friends in one of the movie's persistent and unintentionally hilarious anachronisms...

...Like Michael Bay, I have had a dream—a dream in which Hollywood does not defile and degrade history in pursuit of this year's money shot...

...What follows is forty-five minutes of explosions and dogfights, and weirdly photographed scenes of Kate at the hospital trying to deal with the wounded and dying...

...There's nothing braver than the heart of a volunteer...

...The commercial featured an alien spacecraft blowing up the White House, and it electrified the moviegoing public, which then had to wait breathlessly for six months until the film finally opened on July 3. Independence Day earned $50 million in its first weekend, shattering all previous records, and market research indicated the audience had been drawn to it primarily because of repeated exposure to the money shot...

...This Happened...

...But before he goes, he falls in love with the beautiful nurse (Kate Beckinsale) who gives him a shot in his posterior during his physical...

...My favorite comes in the attack, when Josh says, "I think World War II just started...

...He awakened, gripped with an obsession to realize his vision on film...

...Guess what...

...Ben is a cocky lad who always breaks the rules...

...And in a scene that will live in infamy, Franklin Roosevelt (Jon Voight, and no, I'm not kidding) rises from his wheelchair to his feet and tells his depressed military staff, "Do not tell me what can't be done...

...Pearl Harbor's first half is almost entirely unrelated to the attack, and the film makes no effort to explain what we're seeing during the strike—where the U.S...

...In 1940, Ben volunteers to fly for the British, but doesn't tell Josh, because he's always trying to protect Josh...

...We then get to see what happened when his plane crashed...

...The term "money shot" actually comes from the world of pornography...

...And before she can tell Josh, who should show up but . . . you guessed it...

...The dialogue by Randall Wallace is so bad, many of the scenes could be performed verbatim on Saturday Night Live as parodies...

...In England, Ben pines for Kate...

...Michael Bay removes all the horror and tragedy from the Japanese sneak attack, leaving only the sensation—the explosions, the fire, the aerial acrobatics...

...Meanwhile, in Japan, an attack is being planned...

...He punches Josh, and then they fall asleep in a convertible overlooking Honolulu Harbor—from which we cut to a Japanese general tearing a date off his calendar to expose "December 7." Ben and Josh are awakened by the bombs...

...Them...

...And never has the money shot been quite so pornographic as it is in Pearl Harbor...

...Three women are standing on a little wooden bridge at the foot of something that looks like Mt...

...Ben figures out what has happened...

...It refers to a sex film's climactic moment, which is designed to leave nothing to the imagination...

...Right after the attack, a woman confesses in a frustrated whine: "I was going to tell you, but then...

...With the bombing over, it's time to get back to the insufferable story...

...The bombs, bullets, and explosions are the real heroes of this movie because, man, they really do their stuff...

...The plot, if you can call it that, concerns two lifelong friends, played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett...

...The bomb falling from a Japanese Zero, which comes about halfway through the movie's three hours, is Pearl Harbor's "money shot...

...But she doesn't tell Josh...

...Which is why he couldn't get a message out to tell Josh and Kate not to indulge in nooky...

...It was sinking in the English Channel, but he saw Kate's face floating in the water outside his cockpit and somehow found the strength to break through the glass and escape into occupied France...

...Unlike Michael Bay, I have no hope of seeing my dream turned into a reality...

...As the movie inches forward with all the speed and excitement of a tortoise race, Josh and Kate fall in love—guilt-riddled love, of course, because they're both thinking of Ben...

...As Ben and Josh fly over Japan, Bay offers a parallel image to his Morning-in-America montage...

...She's pregnant...

...One day Ben gets shot down...

...None of the bodies bobbing in the water or trapped in the wreckage of the USS Arizona belong to characters we know or care about, whose death might give us a sense of what was lost on December 7, 1941...

...In his dream, he followed a bomb, falling from a plane, as it descended ever more rapidly to crash into the deck of a ship...

...It seems to have been Bay's original intention to suggest that Doolit-tle's raid followed immediately after-ward—since a sarong-wearing Kate shows no visible signs of pregnancy on the day of the raid, five months following Pearl Harbor...

...We see his plane crash into the English Channel...

...And in the mammoth new Pearl Harbor, Bay's vision is realized...

...They join the Army and become pilots...

...And then Josh and Ben leave Hawaii to join Jimmy Doolittle in the daring retaliatory raid on Tokyo...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The director Michael Bay had a dream one night as he considered how to film an epic movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor...

...Josh is awkward with the ladies because his daddy didn't treat him right back in Tennessee...

...And so, once again, everything bows to Hollywood's insistence that movies have "arc"—even a movie about the bloodiest and most important war the world has ever seen...