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Bullwinkle58 -> RE: Slightly off topic - New Midway movie (8/31/2010 3:16:21 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jomni
Good point. My wife appreciated Pearl Harbor's love aspect. The movie has substance for her. We watched it together.
Not like Black Hawk Down, which I kinda liked. Another war movie that we watched together. At least it had some good looking guys like Orlando Bloom.
She never accompnied me while I watched BOB and The Pacific. But she kinda appreciated the fact that The Pacific had several love scenes.
You mentioned "Avatar"... Wouldn't a WW2 movie in 3D be cool!
Cool? Maybe not the word I'd use.[:)]
The thing is, a work of art--any art--has to be judged against the intent of the artist. "Pearl Harbor" was terrible history, no question. But it didn't set out to be a documentary. "Tora Tora Tora" was better, on purpose, but still not a documentary. "Pearl Harbor" should be judged against what it wanted to be, and on that it was a C- at best. It was an historical romance, not a movie about history. That said, it had some redeemig features. Any movie that tries to show an American audience even a little of Dorie Miller's story is a good thing.
Modern war movies, say, 1970 onward, have to be about characters, and not simply events, to get made. "Saving Private Ryan" wasn't about D-Day. D-Day was the canvas, but that story structure would have worked in a Civil War setting, or a Crimean War setting. The twin Iwo Jima movies of late were about the men, not the battle. (The US one was about the home front mostly. The Iwo scenes were pretty minor.)
Even classic war movies pre-1970 told micro-stories against the big canvas of war. "From Here to Eternity" was about love and hate (and a bunch of other stuff.) "Lawrence of Arabia" wasn't a war movie, it was a movie with a war. "In Harm's Way", ditto, with at least two love story arcs (and a rape.) Even the granddaddy war movie of the 1960s, "The Longest Day", while on the surface being a "hard" history of the battle, was really just a loosely-strung series of vignettes, often played for humor. It was a cameo-fest ("Look, there's Red Buttons!"), not a tightly woven plot narrative.
Movies are about people and what happens to them under stress and crisis, more or less. Fiction. Ficiton requires conflict, and humans most like to see conflict with other humans, or, sometimes nature or God. But a movie about ships maneuvering and firing at each other, like a "pure" Leyte movie, not only wouldn't get made, it wouldn't be very interesting as fiction.
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