Editorials Reviews Previews Essays Worth Playing

Movies & Series

Movies & Series 21 April 2022, 13:26

author: Jan Tracz

Pearl Harbor – starting the invasion. The most expensive scenes in cinema history

Table of Contents

  1. Movie budget: $140 million
  2. Scene budget: $5.5 million
  3. Where to watch: Chili, Rakuten

Michael Bay – rings a bell? Certainly! Stronghold, Armageddon, the Transformes series. He's got quite a filmography on his account. He's a man who's not afraid to push the boundaries of explosions (and demolition) on the screen, and most of his films offer quite smooth entertainment. Unfortunately, his 2001 Pearl Harbor (a movie heralded as new quality and a masterpiece of war cinema) turned out to be an almost complete flop, even today ridiculed by film fans around the world.

The whole movie boils down to a lot of explosions (Bay wanted to show the war as it was), but the director forgot that a film cannot consist of just pyrotechnics. Poorly written characters and infantilization of war contributed to many negative reviews from critics. However, if we turn a blind eye to some nonsense, we can always go back to the sequence where Japan begins its invasion of Pearl Harbor.

Bay wanted the invasion to be portrayed "with a bang." He did not use CGI, but used as many twelve different cameras, four thousand gallons of gasoline, and seven hundred sticks of dynamite. Moreover, the entire sequence runs for about forty minutes (and took a month to shoot). Which is why this scene topped $5.5 million.

Jan Tracz

Jan Tracz

Graduated Film Studies (BA and MA) at King's College London, UK. Currently, he writes for Collider, WhyNow, The Upcoming, Ayo News, Interia Film, Przegląd, Film.org.pl, and Gamepressure.com. He has had publications in FIPRESCI, Eye For Film, British Thoughts Magazine, KINO, Magazyn PANI, WP Film, NOIZZ, Papaya Rocks, Tygodnik Solidarnosc, and Filmawka. He has also collaborated with Rock Radio and Movies Room. Conducted interviews with Alejandro González Ińárritu, Lasse Hallström, Michel Franco, Matthew Lewis, and David Thomson. His published works include an essay in the anthology "Nikt Nikomu Nie Tlumaczy: Swiat wedlug Kiepskich w kulturze" (Brak Przypisu Publishing, 2023). Laureate of the Leopold Unger Scholarship in 2023. Member of the Young FIPRESCI Jury during WFF 2023.

more

See/Add Comments