Pearl Harbor

I (a sansei) thought I would pass along some brief thoughts on the movie "Pearl Harbor," which I saw Friday. Mostly, it was innocuous in a thoroughly Hollywood way. Which is to say, it truly is (as Disney hyped) a love story, framed around the attack, which is really just a plot device and an excuse for typical Bruckheimer explosions and fireballs. The film is not about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, with more than 45 minutes left after the attack, the rest of the film takes a long denouement or detour, depending on your expectations, following the April 1942 propaganda bombing mission over Japan by Col. Doolittle's B-25 bombers. This long ending accomplishes several things: It allows the love triangle -- the core of the story -- to be resolved nicely though tearfully; it allows the shock and anger and perhaps the hatred of the "sneak attack" to dissipate; and like the actual Doolittle raid itself, it allows the film's viewers (at least in the US) to leave the theater on a jingoistically upbeat note. "Yeah, we showed 'em. How dare they bomb Pearl Harbor and decimate our fleet; we scared 'em silly by dropping some bombs over Tokyo and some other cities then crashing into the Sea of Japan or China. We showed 'em."

I can't blame Hollywood for ending the film this way -- Hollywood is nothing if not the factory of happy endings, right? -- and maybe such a treatment will really help distract audiences from any racist tendencies they may have against Japanese, or Asians in general. But the fact of the matter is that the Japanese attackers in the film weren't demonized at all. In a weird way, they were dismissed, almost faceless. Mako, the veteran Japanese American actor with the craggy face, plays Admiral Yamamoto, one of the few Japanese speaking parts and the only Japanese character we get to know in the film. The rest of the Japanese may as well be Martians for the attention producer Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay pay them. Is that a good