Did anyone else notice how many references or allusions there were to Herman Merlville’s novel in this movie?
I mean, when the sailor’s were trapped in the Arizona. This reminded me of the chapter when they have the skull of a sperm whale draped over the side of the Pequod, a sailor cutting the blubber off falls in and the whole thing falls into the ocean. Queequeg jumps in after him, sword in mouth, rescuing him (ok, the fact that this sailor was rescued sort of makes it falter, but you see what I mean?).
FDR also seemed to be portrayed as Ahab, the cripple bent on revenge, willing to sacrifice his most able-bodied men to deal this fate.
I am alone on this? I was seriously thinking about this the whole movie.
Saw it last night, wasn’t bad, wasn’t great. Liked Gladiator better. Did notice a couple of glitches that no one’s pointed out. I only saw two people smoking in the whole film. Uh, guys, I realize that you don’t want to encourage kiddies to smoke, so I can understand the central characters not smoking, but almost no one else? This was, after all, the 1940s, lots of people smoked back then. I think close to half the adult population did. Another glitch was the bottle of Jack Daniels, while the Miller beer bottles looked right for the time period, the Jack Daniels bottle (and thanks to product placement you can see it prominently) had the plastic seal around the top. Oh well, at least it wasn’t a plastic bottle. Also, the scenes of Dolittles planes taking off (and boy, was Baldwin ever the wrong guy to pick for that role) is waaay more dramatic looking and amazing in the newsreel footage than what was shown in the movie. I could have done without much of the love story, it added waay to much padding to the film. I also kept expecting one of the heroes during the dog fight to say, “I’m gonna slam on the air brakes and he’ll fly right past us!” (or whtever it is Cruise says in Top Gun) Many of the plot elements were totally predictable (no, duh, right?). I mean, you knew when character X was gonna die, or whatever, long before it happened. I also found some of the special effects and camera trickery to be annoying more than anything. It’s amazing, though, one car can absorb hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the rear (where the gas tank is located), but one round hits it in the engine block and the thing explodes and goes flipping all over the place. Probably won’t see it again, or buy it, but I ain’t screaming about the money I spent to see it. Oh, anybody here speak Japanese? I speak a little Chinese and Baldwin butchered the pronounciation of the Chinese phrase he uses, I’m wondering if the Japanese characters pronounced things right or if what they were saying matched the subtitles. Tora! Tora! Tora! is a much better film about the whole deal.
Um… I haven’t spotted THAT in any of the trailers or TV spots, but I did spot what are obviously very badly disguised Perry-class frigates (with helicopter hangars) playing WWII destroyers docked alongside.
Doesn’t surprise me. For those of you who see it (I’m not going to, not until it’s on HBO) a 48 star flag is easy to spot. Both the rows and the columns of stars are in straight lines. In a 50 star flag they’re offset. I thought they had made this mistake at the begining of Pvt. Ryan but it starts in the present day.
I would almost let them have a gimme on this one, but the Japanese Navy stayed on the Japan calendar throughout the mission (since they didn’t have to know when the banks were open), and for Japan, on the far side of the International Date Line, the attack on Pearl Harbor occured on December 8.
tom, I was going to point that out myself, but I wasn’t sure if the Japanese fleet stayed on the Japanese calendar or not.
I was in the Navy and we always changed our clocks whenever we crossed into a new time zone. Heading west, this meant some guys had to stand an extra hour on duty or gain an extra hour’s sleep, depending on when the change was made. Heading east, the exact opposite happened.
I thought this custom was world-wide; I had no reason to believe otherwise.
I saw this splotch, it was during a “behind the screens” show on AMC. They were showing how the film was made. A helicopter with a camera was “running down” soldiers on the ground. It was not a Japanese attack helicopter.
