Pearl Harbor

I saw this movie for the first time today, and it was less terrible than I was expecting. This could have been due to several factors.

1. I was locked out of my room for about 5.5 hours today, and so the 3 hours it took away from my life would have been spent doing nothing else productive.
2. I had been told that the movie was horrible--like, completely and utterly terrible, and was thus expecting to be completely disapointed. Usually when that happens, I end up at least slightly surprised, and in this case, I was even pleasantly surprised.
3. My friend who I watched the movie with edited out a scene involving parachutes...apparently it would have been too much, and is pretty infamous. Whatev, I haven't seen it, and can probably put the pieces together on my own.

So, the movie at least made me think about a few things. First, isn't it interesting how we find ourselves rooting for the good old American flyboys, and comdeming those Japanese to the abyss from which they must have crawled? I thought it was interesting that the movie let you do that by only showing the Japanese fighters preparing for a sneak attack, and when they were determined to kill Americans. When those flyboys are shooting at the planes, you don't ever see their faces, you just see the planes blow up. Now, I'm certainly not stating that I think the Japanese should have won the war, or anything like that, it brings a whole new perspective to the horrors of war though when you think about the fact that EVERY death mattered to someone, and that both sides feel the pain of the war. Americans do a good job of synthesizing this information when we're talking about the Civil War, and that's because it was 600,000 Americans who died. Just an interesting thing to think about. I don't know if we're capable of comprehending that kind of human suffering. It's difficult enough to understand the suffering of just one person over the death of someone they care about, let alone comprehending the feelings of the collective family and friends of all those who died. It's an incredibly sad thought. It brings me back to All Quiet on the Western Front. There's a quote in there where he talks about the other side being seen as robots, and as faceless ghosts. I don't think it would be possible to fight against and kill other people unless you were able to make them less than human in your mind.

The fact that the movie spurred some of these thoughts made the ending seem a bit trite. Yes, it ended up cleanly, and she got to marry the man she really loved, the man who she loved, but not as much, was still a hero, and the friends reconciled. After all the suffering they showed, it was really hard to believe the "happily ever after" feeling the end of the movie had. It was all so terribly convenient. Sad, and terrible, but convenient. Overall, the movie was better than I was expecting, but still not something I would purchase. I might watch it again...sometime, in the future, which is not soon.