If you want truth, talk to a gossip, read a tabloid, believe a rumour; but don't go a film. Film is not truth. Film is merely a strip of celluloid bearing a variety of light-sensitive chemicals which, when exposed to certain carefully-created photons, registers their impact.
It's as reasonable to expect that strip of celluloid to convey truth as it is to expect subneutronic particles to give a performance of Mahlers' Fifth or a bag of bricks to recite Shakespeare. Truth is not a commodity which is compatible with or expressible by film. Film is chemicals. That's what film is.
Of course, as the chemicals have become more and more complex, and the entire industry behind those chemicals more and more self-regarding, the belief has become established that truth is somehow or other something that can be captured on film; and it is true that sometimes certain chemical reflections can look like how we imagine truth to be. But that is an illusion created by our imaginations; it is our willing suspension of all those critical faculties which would otherwise accept the great truth that Film is a Lie. Instead, we surrender to those uncritical and credulous parts of our minds as they enter a conspiracy with the filmmaker to say that film is truth. It's not. Say it again. Film is chemicals. That's what film is.
Pearl Harbour
That's what Pearl Harbour is. Never mind what you've read about this film (especially from British reviewers). As an example of how chemicals on a celluloid strip can entertain, Pearl Harbour is simply marvellous. As an example of blockbuster film-making it is infinitely superior to Titanic, which one had to endure two hours of before we got to see its real hero, the iceberg. No: Pearl Harbour gives you action, stunning action, early on; and from that point on, you can sit back, rest your feet on the shoulders of the woman sitting in front of you and make free with the popcorn.
Of course, its presentation of history is risible, and more so than most chemicals manage. It manages to compress the Battle of Britain (1940) into the same summer as the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (1941). It has serving USAAF officers commissioned into the RAF. It has second World War Douglas DC3s equipped with radar radomes from the 1960s. It has a Japan which is miraculously innocent of the most publicly visible war-crime of the 20th century, the Rape of Nanking. All irrelevant.
For this is chemicals at play, and that those chemicals are even able to convey recognisable similarities to what we know happened is a major achievement. Pearl Harbour does that, and we can ask no more than that of it.
No London raids
Yet for some reason, people seem to think light-sensitive chemicals should convey all truth at all times; some British reviewers have complained that 40,000 Londoners died in the night-raids of the winter of 1940-41, and they get no mention in the film. One might also gently point out that the hundreds of Ukrainian women slave workers drowned in their dormitory by the RAF were not mentioned in the British film The Dam Busters.
But that's the nature of narrative. A lot of things were happening at the time of the siege of Troy which don't get mentioned in that particular tale - possibly mightier things, more tragic things, more important things, more educational things. But those things belong to other narratives.
Story-telling is about the selection of events and the creation of a syntax to give them narrative unity. It would be as ridiculous for Pearl Harbour to dwell upon the London blitz as it would to contemplate the plight of fishermen in the Orkneys or the diet of plankton in Norwegian fjords.
There's no such thing as a realistic war movie. Realism would require real people to die really, and horribly, in front of you. Realism is beyond the captivity of light-sensitive chemicals. Indeed, far from Pearl Harbour attempting to be realistic, it has chosen to be faithful to the traditional forms of fable.
Mythic love
Once we discover that two men love the same woman, we know the outcome: one must die. This is the nature of mythic love, from Paris and Meneleus at Ilium 701BC to Hollywood in 2001AD, via Camelot, A Tale of Two Cities, My Darling Clementine and almost everything by Thomas Hardy. It is a rule as rigid as the criminal law, and to deviate from it is to subvert the primary canon of this narrative form.
Never mind that Pearl Harbour does not mention the 100,000 or so Chinese who were murdered by the Japanese because US aircrew used China as an escape route after bombing Tokyo in retaliation for the Pearl Harbour attack. Never mind the utter risibility of the surviving American bringing home the dead body of his friend in a deal coffin from a paddy field in war-torn China. Never mind any of the departures from reality into ludicrous fantasy. The very point about good film-making is that it can take us into such utter absurdity, and we accept what is being done to us there.
Go to see Pearl Harbour because its special effects are quite breathtaking, because it is a brilliantly assembled piece of hokum, because it is a celebration of film as a strip of celluloid adhering to rigid rules of story-telling. It's a better film by far than Saving Private Ryan. It's an honest acknowledgment of what film is. Chemicals.