5) Pearl Harbor
It’s extremely disappointing to me that director Michael Bay (one of the most vilified directors in the business, and not just because of the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles redo) felt the need to Hollywood-ize one of the most devastating homeland attacks in American history. Due to Randall Wallace’s lazy script and Bay’s similar inattention to accuracy, Pearl Harbor remains one of the questionable “historical” epics of all time.
The inaccuracies in Pearl Harbor begin long before the central attack. Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) would most certainly have not joined an RAF Eagle Squadron, as a law at the time prohibited active US military servicemen from joining the forces of foreign nations. At one point, McCawley and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) are threatened with being thrown into the brig, a term which the Army would never have used. Navy Nurses did not determine whether Army Air Corps officers were fit to fly; in fact, there was very little interaction between the two groups. Various plane models and military inventions designed much later into the 20th Century are shown in the film, for no apparent reason other than shoddy research.
When Pearl Harbor arrives at the titular attack, Bay’s film abandons all pretense of historical accuracy. Admiral Kimmel (Colm Feore) was not on a golf course on the morning of December 7th, 1941. The Japanese planes were not dark green as they are in Pearl Harbor; we know for certain that the planes were painted light grey. McCawley and Walker did not take to the skies and shoot down seven Japanese planes during the attack, nor were they involved in a silly love triangle with a Navy Nurse.
Furthermore, ships like the USS Oklahoma randomly change position throughout the battle, leading to many inner continuity errors as well as historical ones. Also, the Japanese did not actively target military hospitals, at least as far as we know. You’d think that Pearl Harbor would have exhausted itself with that many inaccuracies, but the errors just keep coming.
There’s no evidence that the discussion between FDR, Admiral Nimitz and General Marshall took place as depicted in the film, as there was no question in the minds of the three men that a retaliatory attack was necessary. Even more absurdly, that part where the polio-afflicted FDR (Jon Voight) rises from his wheelchair to make a dramatic point? Total fiction. Shockingly, polio doesn’t go away whenever you feel like being a badass.
Finally, no one was involved in both the Doolittle Raid and the Pearl Harbor attack. In fact, the Doolittle Raid was less of a ‘revenge’ attack and more a symbolic show of strength for the United States, one that had very little effect on the outcome of World War II. If any of you are planning on coasting through APUSH on historical epics, be sure to leave Pearl Harbor off your list of study materials.