Pearl Harbor is a war film released in the summer of 2001 by Touchstone Pictures. It stars Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jaime King, and Jennifer Garner. It was a dramatic re-imagining of the attack on Pearl Harbor, produced by the team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, who had previously been involved with such summer blockbusters as Armageddon and The Rock. The final section of the movie relates the Doolittle Raid, the first American attack on the Japanese home islands in World War II.Production, release and critical response
Pearl Harbor was released Memorial Day weekend in 2001 and was released on DVD to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the attack. Despite its dazzling special effects, the movie received generally poor reviews, many critics dismissing the film as shallow, hackneyed, and historically insensitive, with critic Roger Ebert claiming that "The filmmakers seem to have aimed the film at an audience that may not have heard of Pearl Harbor, or perhaps even of World War Two." The bombastic tone of the film was frequently cited as the polar opposite of the 1998 Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan. It was also alluded to in the film Team America: World Police in the song End of an Act; the song is in love ballad style, but the lyrics proclaiming the speaker's emotions about the addressed girl are almost entirely overtaken by lyrics railing on the film ("Girl, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Pearl Harbor sucked and I miss you.").
The movie cost approximately $140 million US to produce, earning it the title of the largest approved production budget for a film to that date, and it grossed approximately $200 million in the US market. Nonetheless, this was considered to be a disappointment, due to the accounting methods used to determine the net profit made by motion pictures.Historical inaccuracies
The movie portrays many of the widely held but unverified beliefs about the Pearl Harbor attack as being unambiguously true, such as Doris Miller's exaggerated heroism, and the carelessness or incompetence of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short (subsequent investigations showed that neither of the officers were informed by the Office of Naval Intelligence prior to the attack).
Other inaccuracies or fabrications include:
Early childhood sequences
- Stearman biplane (the crop-duster aircraft) was not produced until 1935. However, the opening scene is set in 1923.
Battle of Britain sequences
- A four-bladed Supermarine Spitfire is shown during the Battle of Britain in the film; a Spitfire model that was not available until 1942, though the Battle of Britain takes place during 1940 (specifically May through October).
- Ben Affleck's character flies with a Royal Air Force squadron (which used Supermarine Spitfires), but the planes actually featured in the movie bear the RF code letters of the No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron and are, in fact, Hawker Hurricanes.
- During the Battle of Britain flight sequences, the British spitfires are shown flying in the standard American four-ship formation. The British actually flew in the three-ship or "VIC" formation.
Pearl Harbor sequences
- The USS Arizona Memorial, which straddles the USS Arizona sunk during the battle, can be briefly seen in a pan shot. The Memorial was dedicated in the 1960's.
- In the movie, the USS Arizona was sunk by a Aichi D3A Val, using a single bomb but the real-life Arizona was sunk by a "special bomb" from the B5N Kate utility bomber.
- Admiral Kimmel was not on a golf course on the morning of the attack, nor was he notified of the Japanese embassy leaving Washington, D.C. prior to the attack. The first official notification of the attack was received by General Short several hours after the attack had ended.
- At the time of the attack, the battleships in "Battleship Row" were tied directly together, not spaced 50 yards apart as they were in the movie.
- Some shots of the USS Hornet show an angle-decked carrier (USS Constellation) instead of a straight-decked carrier. The angled deck was a post-WWII invention.
- In the movie, in excess of eleven Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighters were destroyed or downed. In reality, only nine Zero fighters were destroyed by any means (i.e. anti-aircraft guns, planes) in the real bombing of Pearl Harbor.
- Japanese aircraft of that period were painted light grey, not green.
- Navy Nurse Betty dies during the Pearl Harbor attack, but no Navy Nurses died as a result of enemy action during the entirety of World War II, including the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- The ward dresses of the nurses have a different style than the ones Navy Nurses actually wore during WWII and no nurse would have worked with long hair falling freely about her shoulders.
- Some of the bombed ships are actually mothballed Knox-class frigates and Spruance-class destroyers, with the box launchers for anti-submarine rockets, known as ASROCs, visible. That technology wasn't available until the 1960s.
- One of the intelligence photos taken by the Japanese Spies shows a North Carolina class battleship none of which were in Pearl Harbor at that time. Two of each battleship class (Nevada class battleships (Nevada and Oklahoma), Pennsylvania class battleships (Arizona and Pennsyvania), Colorado class battleships (Maryland and West Virginia), and Tennessee class battleships (Tennessee and California) were moored at Pearl Harbor on that fateful day.
- A retired Iowa class battleship was used to represent the USS West Virginia for Doris Miller's boxing match. However, the main gun barrels are corked, which is unusual during wartime or training exercises. Furthermore, Iowa battleships have a 3x3 main gun configuration versus the 4x2 layout of the West Virginia. Lastly, the West Virginia did not have the WWII-era bridge and masts found on newer US battleships until reconstruction was finished in 1943.
- During the attack on Pearl Harbor in the movie, the P-40N model of the P-40 Warhawk U.S. fighter aircraft is shown. However, the 'N' model of the P-40 was not available to the United States until 1943 though the Pearl Harbor attack takes place during 1941.
- At the Airfield where the pilots are composing themselves and trying to take action against the strafing Japanese planes, Ben Affleck's character erroneously says "P-40s can't outrun Zeroes, we'll just have to outfly them." In fact, the standard tactic for American and Allied pilots, from the AVG (Flying Tigers) in late-1940 through 1941 and throught the Pacific War, was basic "hit-and-run." They would dive on Zeroes, get what "hits" they could, and then outrun them.
- During the boxing scene onboard the battleship USS Arizona, the USS Whipple is shown for a brief moment. The USS Whipple which at the time was a mothballed Knox-Class Frigate.
- In reality, Yamamoto Isoroku did not participate in the attack.
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