There was no secret code to decipher when Disney premiered its explosive $135-million epic tribute to the attack on Pearl Harbor aboard a Navy aircraft carrier moored off the Hawaiian island of Oahu on Monday night. As the frail members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association wheeled their way up the red carpet, past the glimmering shadow of the underwater grave of the USS Arizona where more than 900 sailors are still buried, the signals rang as loud as the F-15 jets screaming overhead.
The three-hour film about to be screened on a flight deck decorated with a vintage B-25 bomber was, above all, a war story to commemorate the 60th anniversary of America's darkest hour. And anyone who might have missed the message amid all the hoopla only had to look up at sunset to see eight Navy SEAL paratroopers jump out of a Black Hawk helicopter and hammer it home.
If, however, you weren't able to attend the $5-million military luau, but were instead walking past a huge poster advertising Pearl Harbor in Tokyo's Shijuku shopping district, you would have noticed a distinct difference in marketing strategy. In Japan, where students are told that the Pearl Harbor attack was one of their country's greatest military achievements of the 20th century (or not taught about it at all), Disney has toned down the images of Japanese aggression and pumped up the romance.
The ominously clouded gunmetal skies teeming with Japanese fighters, so prominently displayed on the film's U.S. posters, have, in Japan, been glossed over by an orange-tinted sunrise scene of three sinking U.S. warships, while a couple of unidentified fighter planes zoom off into the distance. The accompanying text, conspicuously absent in the U.S. posters, describes the film as, "The drama of the century dedicated to hearts throughout the world. 1941. Local time December 7, 6 in the morning, the Hawaiian Islands. On that day, when in an instant the blue of seas and sky was stained deep red. Only love was the final paradise left to young people."
Which raises the question: Is the most anticipated, expensive and massively hyped release of the summer a love story or a war story?
"Both," director Michael Bay curtly explains to a table of journalists, a handful among the hundreds who had flown into Pearl Harbor a few days before the premiere. "It's a love story that gets entangled in a war story."
The film's trailers reveal a similar schizoid quality. Whereas the U.S. trailer features a fearsome Japanese officer mapping out the attack and shouting orders to his pilots as they scramble to tie up their Rising Sun headbands, before leading them to a thundering attack on Battleship Row, the Japanese trailer lingers over a simmering shot of two young lovers embracing underwater.
Although dramatically different, these teasers are not entirely deceitful. Pearl Harbor does indeed encompass two separate stories -- actually three. There is a war horse of a romantic love triangle ponderously developed in the first 90 minutes, which features Ben Affleck as a dashing fighter pilot who valiantly flies off to the Battle of Britain, where he presumably dies, leaving his best friend and girlfriend behind. Then there is a dazzlingly jarring 40-minute reenactment of Japan's early-morning attack, followed by more pyrotechnics and a triumphant finale during which the film's handsome heroes tragically resolve their romantic conflict while reversing America's fortunes and the course of the war as fearless volunteers in Major James Doolittle's 1942 raid on Tokyo.
The reasoning behind the romance is obvious. As James Cameron's Titanic illustrated, the movie-going masses are hungry for old-fashioned epic-style love stories to wash down with their popcorn.
The problem, however, is that all advance reviews agree the love story falls phenomenally flat. "Bay approaches the romance with the same pow-kapang! cartoon energy he brought to Armageddon," Newsweek's David Ansen wrote last week, echoing similar sentiments from an overwhelming number of journalists who attended last week's press junket.
But in retrospect, Bay says he wouldn't make any changes to the love story. He is, however, still obviously sore about the weight of the PG-13 rating he was saddled with in the United States (AA in Ontario). "If I could do anything, I would honestly add a little more violence. Survivors really want kids to see this movie, but I know when a 50-calibre round goes through your chest, it cuts you in half. I did my best to make you feel the violence, without showing everything."
Perhaps a lame love story won't matter so much when it's drowned out by dive bombers and the splashy explosion of nearly 200 digital-effect shots. But the Japanese market certainly does. The industry weekly Variety estimates that almost 65 per cent of total box-office revenue for Hollywood films comes from international markets, with Japan traditionally accounting for approximately 30 per cent. In order to recoup the extravagant costs of Pearl Harbor, Disney certainly couldn't ignore it. And while promotion of the film's romantic angle will help woo Tokyo teenagers, the producers paid extra attention to cultural sensitivities. Perhaps even more so now that the film is being released in the wake of the U.S. Navy's sinking of a Japanese fishing vessel off the coast of Hawaii in February, and mere months before Disney SeaWorld opens in Tokyo.
To help handle this potential depth charge in the story, Japanese advisers were brought on board and the script was sent to Disney's Japan division for notes before production began. As a direct result, according to co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a voice-over at the end of the film describing the torture of several of captured Doolittle Raiders was taken out. Some dialogue is also being tweaked, according to a recent Associated Press report, in a revised edition for the Japanese and German markets. A bucolic scene in which children fly their kites over a pond while the Japanese officers plot out their strategy in the foreground was added at Bay's suggestion. And the overall impression imparted to the audience is that Admiral Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was a reluctant warrior, forced into the attack out of economic desperation and against his better judgment.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the Japanese-American actor who portrays Commander Minoru Genda, says he was pleasantly surprised and relieved when he read the script. "When I heard the words Pearl Harbor and Hollywood, I thought, 'Oh, no. Please don't do that.' My greatest hope was to get out of the last millennium and stop counting how many anniversaries of Pearl Harbor there had been. This was my worst nightmare. Then they said, 'Michael Bay,' and I said, ' Armageddon Michael Bay?' It just kept getting worst. But when I read the script, I realized it was the best-case scenario. It was handled with respect, with dignity. I think even to the point that some people might find it too soft. But I think it was simply fair."
Josh Hartnett, 22, who plays Affleck's best friend and nemesis in love, is one of those people. "I think the movie was extra responsible in the way it portrayed Japan. Maybe too responsible." Tom Sizemore agrees. The actor, who plays an airplane mechanic in the film and appeared also in Saving Private Ryan, says he hopes Pearl Harbor imbues its U.S. audience with a renewed sense of patriotism. "What this movie shows is that this will never happen again to us. We are on alert because of this. That's why we have reconnaissance flights," he adds, referring to the recent confrontation between a Chinese fighter pilot and a U.S. spy plane.
And it is these hawkish generalized sentiments exactly that have Japanese-Americans worried that the film will create an anti-Asian backlash. John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest and largest Asian-American civil-rights organization in the United States, says he has ordered extra security for the organization's building and sent out an alert action plan to chapters around the country.
Pearl Harbor's Japanese distributors, though, still expect the film to be a big hit when it is released there in July. "We're confident that the film can appeal to a wide audience, from the young to the old," says Yoko Kishi, spokeswoman for the distributor Buenavista International Japan. "It's an entertainment, a love story."
The biggest potential problem that Disney now faces is a U.S. backlash from war-film buffs. What will they say when they discover that beneath all those sunken battle ships lies a chick flick?
Pearl Harbor survivor Dick Fiske, a sailor stationed on the USS West Virginia when the Japanese arrived, scoffs at the ridiculousness of a love story in that setting. "Do you realize that in 1940 and '41, there were 375 men for every woman in Pearl Harbor? We all had to stand in line. There were only about 30,000 people here in Honolulu at that time. There was all these army guys, the marines, all these navy guys. What did you want us to do? There may have been somebody with a love story, but I don't know.
"I'm not saying we didn't stand in line," he adds with a naughty chuckle, "but I'm not going to say where we did it."
Alexandra Gill