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May 29, 2001
It's three hours long, and cost about $140 million to make. That's over half a billion Egyptian pounds, by the way.
And it's already made $75 million of that back in four days at the US box office.
The name of the flick is Pearl Harbor, and one of the reasons why this big-budget war epic is so special is because of the massive global marketing campaign that is accompanying it. The fact that the movie is opening nearly simultaneously across the globe makes it a major symbol of where culture and entertainment are going these days. In many ways it's the Michael Jackson of movies (the gloved one's album History, remember, was also released simultaneously world-wide several years ago), a user-friendly dose of moderated pop, substituting edge with plenty of canned emotion.
The sneak preview/premier of the Disney epic took place at the Renaissance cinema at the World Trade Center in downtown Cairo on Monday night. The event was attended by a bevy of prominent critics, as well as movie stars Iman, Kahled El-Nabawi, Sherif Mounir, Hisham Abdel-Hamid and others. Other guests included the famous Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, and American University Press director Mark Linz.
The much-ballyhooed, long-awaited film stars Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsdale, as well as Dan Ackroyd, Jon Voight, Cuba Gooding, Jr, and Alec Baldwin.
The movie goes on general release in Cairo on Wednesday. Will Egyptian audiences turn it into as big a hit as Titanic was in Cairo a few years ago? Considering the melodramatic storyline is highly reminiscent, in some ways, of a certain breed of Egyptian film, it will probably be even huger than expected. Does this sound familiar...a pilot's plane crashes, his girl and best friend back home think he's dead, grieve for him for a while, then get together themselves. Just when they thought everything was dandy, he reappears... I seem to remember a Mahmoud Yassin film with a very similar plot-line -- is this where Hollywood is getting its ideas these days?
Let's be honest: this is not a very deep movie. The basic premise is meant to drive home the point that the US's global supremacy was nearly forced upon it as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the words of the Japanese admiral who orchestrates the attack, "the sleeping giant" was awakened, for better or worse -- and nothing has been the same since.
It's more the rollicking adventure and the cliched love story that's going to pack them in. Admittedly, the 40-minute attack scene was tremendous, all adrenalin, a vivid example of Hollywood high-rolling at its finest. The love story and dialogue could have used some improvement, but when you're bombarded by an endless volley of beautiful Technicolor Hawaiian sunsets and plane chases that basically take your breath away, those kinds of details easily slip by the way-side.
The critics are probably going to hate it. A lot of them have already weighed in with their gripes about the weak story-line, etc. But in this case, the hype has been enough to make the critical disdain relatively ineffectual. After all, the critics get to see the movie for free. Everyone else, meanwhile, is willing to fork up the cost of a ticket just to find out just what those $140 million were all about.
by Karim Darwich
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