Cinema: Pearl Harbor's Top Gun

• Share

One thing about Jerry Bruckheimer: he really knows how to blow stuff up. As one of Hollywood's biggest and most durable producers, he blasted through Alcatraz in The Rock, tossed an airliner full of psychos onto the Las Vegas strip in Con Air and destroyed a hurling asteroid in Armageddon. In the 1980s, along with his late partner, the fast-living Don Simpson, he changed the movie business forever with a highly comic, highly charged formula of music, muscles and mayhem. Through sales of movie tickets, videocassettes and sound tracks, he has generated an estimated $11 billion. And now, wouldn't you know it, he is going soft.

Not that Pearl Harbor is a wimpy movie. Plenty of things explode, but it's the most serious-minded film of Bruckheimer's career, and it has arrived with not only some of the greatest hype in history but the burden of history as well. Critics will tell you in no uncertain terms that it creaks under this weight. Bruckheimer will tell you he doesn't need their approval. "If I had to go by reviews, I wouldn't be making movies," says the producer, sounding a little grumpy on opening day, just hours after the New York Times called Pearl Harbor "defiantly, extravagantly average." "All I know," adds Bruckheimer, "is that we're selling out at theaters."

But those who know Bruckheimer believe he is sensitive to what others say about him; his protective wife Linda has been known to send scathing notes to journalists who treat him badly. Though he won't admit his age ("In Hollywood, they think you're over the hill at a certain point"), he is said to be 55 and seems to be hearing a certain ticking. With Pearl Harbor, he is fighting for respectability and a grown-up audience. The battle began two years ago.

The idea for the film came from Todd Garner, a Disney executive at the time. He approached Bruckheimer, who says he was intrigued by "a period that had a lot of innocence and a lot of brutality at the same time." The concept now seems like a no-brainer; Steven Spielberg (with Saving Private Ryan) and Tom Brokaw (in his Greatest Generation books) have spun America's WW II nostalgia into gold, but market research for Pearl Harbor showed that the desirable high-moviegoing audience of adults ages 19 to 24 generally had no idea what Pearl Harbor was.

Enter Michael Bay, who had wowed young audiences for Bruckheimer as director of Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon. "I felt the time was right for him to make a spectacular movie," says Bruckheimer, who is known for his loyalty. "Michael is his generation's Spielberg or Lucas." (Pearl Harbor's costume designer, Michael Kaplan, is the same guy who cut up sweat shirts for Bruckheimer's 1983 Flashdance.) With screenwriter Randall Wallace (Braveheart), they took a cue from the Titanic playbook and composed a central fictional love story. Two strapping pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett), friends since boyhood, fall for a hot nurse (Kate Beckinsale). Ultimate sacrifices ensue. Authentic figures such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Jon Voight), Lieut. Colonel James H. Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) and heroic black mess attendant Doris "Dorie" Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.) appear in supporting roles, and the backdrop reaches for historical accuracy--at least until it gets in the way of the main story.