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