Eighty years ago today forces of the Japanese Empire attacked United States military installations in Hawaii, I think.

This is not a history site.

There are a number of movies about this, but I’m focusing on two today for a number of reasons. 1) These two are probably the most prominent ones. 2) The later movie is in many ways a response to the earlier one. 3) I don’t want to review From Here to Eternity yet. 4) I could get these movies inexpensively.

Here’s how these two movies are different: Tora! Tora! Tora! is an interesting exercise in film making striving for historical accuracy and Pearl Harbor is not.

Here’s how they are alike–they show scenes of the Japanese planning the attack and the US being naively ineffective in preparing for it. They both have excellent sequences depicting the attack on Pearl Harbor.

They also both have an intermission, which is a thing some longer movies had in the twentieth century. Pearl Harbor was released in the twenty-first century, so its having one is odd. Tora! Tora! Tora!‘s comes right before the attack itself. Pearl Harbor is so ridiculously long that the intermission comes after the attack.

But there’s an interesting difference worth talking about. One reason Pearl Harbor is so egregiously long is because it introduces characters to increase our investment in them so when there’s actual combat, we care about the participants.

Tora! Tora! Tora! doesn’t do that. We aren’t personally invested in anyone who dies or fights during the movie. When we see Doris “Dorie” Miller in Tora! Tora! Tora! we only know who he is if we know his story already. All we see is a Black man manning an anti-aircraft gun.

Elven Havard as Doris “Dorie” Miller. He has no lines in the film.

In Pearl Harbor Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Miller, and he has a story, one that is reasonably accurate. We see him as a boxing champion, which Miller was, and aiding his mortally wounded captain, which Miller did. We also know he wasn’t assigned to fire that weapon–or any weapon–we know he worked in the mess.

Academy Award Winner Cuba Gooding Jr. as Doris “Dorie” Miller

So Pearl Harbor tries to make us care about the people fighting and dying in a way that Tora! Tora! Tora! does not. Some people who die in Pearl Harbor we have seen as people–we know their names. I don’t think we know the name of anyone who dies in Tora! Tora! Tora! This is not necessarily a flaw, but I think the team behind Pearl Harbor thought it was, as did the people involved in 1975s Midway. Both of these movies lose historical accuracy and spend screen time establishing characters for us to root for, and maybe they shouldn’t have.