Bunk, but unlikely to bomb

The bombs are already beginning to fall on Jerry Bruckheimer's new, Disney-backed $130m (£90m) wartime epic, Pearl Harbor (scheduled to receive its world premiere in Hawaii in late May). The award-winning composer Hans Zimmer was reported last week to have been so dismayed by the film that he refused to write any new music for it. (He is said to have dusted down the unused bits from his score for The Thin Red Line instead.) The usual, scurrilous critiques have already been posted on websites. "Not a movie for people who don't like jingoistic war movies with love triangles," notes one reviewer. Still, Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay will be encouraged by the wildly enthusiastic response of at least some of the spectators at preview screenings earlier this month. The special effects, it seems, are awesome: not surprising considering this is the most expensive movie of all time.

The bombs are already beginning to fall on Jerry Bruckheimer's new, Disney-backed $130m (£90m) wartime epic, Pearl Harbor (scheduled to receive its world premiere in Hawaii in late May). The award-winning composer Hans Zimmer was reported last week to have been so dismayed by the film that he refused to write any new music for it. (He is said to have dusted down the unused bits from his score for The Thin Red Line instead.) The usual, scurrilous critiques have already been posted on websites. "Not a movie for people who don't like jingoistic war movies with love triangles," notes one reviewer. Still, Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay will be encouraged by the wildly enthusiastic response of at least some of the spectators at preview screenings earlier this month. The special effects, it seems, are awesome: not surprising considering this is the most expensive movie of all time.

Judging by the trailer, Pearl Harbor will indeed be spectacular in a From Here To Eternity meets Top Gun sort of way. Between the dogfights, English actress Kate Beckinsale (a young navy nurse) and rugged vest-wearing pilot Ben Affleck will no doubt do their best to imitate Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster. This is a curious subject, though, for a flag-waving summer blockbuster. Pearl Harbor wasn't exactly a glowing moment in recent American history. It comes under the heading "debacle" rather than "triumph". Not surprisingly, the raid itself played only a tiny part in James Jones' massive novel, From Here To Eternity. You have to wait until page 849 of the new paperback edition for a big, red-headed boy to disturb the soldiers at breakfast by running amok, shouting, "The Japs is bombing Wheeler Field! I seen the red circles on the wings!"

Fred Zinnemann's 1953 film adaptation of Jones's novel was as much an introspective character study as conventional, testosterone-driven war movie. Columbia boss Harry Cohn was appalled by Zinnemann's decision to shoot in black and white, and thoroughly disapproved of the casting of anguished method actor Montgomery Clift as the lone wolf, trumpet-playing anti-hero, Prewett. "He is no soldier and no boxer - and probably a homosexual," Cohn, (who had wanted bull-necked Aldo Ray for the part), is reported to have said of Clift. Much to Cohn's amazement, the film turned out to be a huge box-office hit.

Pearl Harbor is likely to set the box-office tills ringing too: last time Bay and Bruckheimer joined forces, on Armageddon in 1998, they grossed over $200m in America alone. This time round, they'll be aiming for a hit of Titanic proportions, but subtlety is not a word which features in either's lexicon.

Anybody looking for a more thoughtful and oblique take on the events surrounding Pearl Harbor might be drawn instead to Japanese director Takeshi Kitano's new gangster thriller, Brother. A hardboiled tale about a Tokyo tough guy (played by Kitano himself) who goes to Los Angeles in search of his younger half-brother and quickly establishes himself as an utterly ruthless and violent gang leader, Brother seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the climactic events of 7 December, 1941. The clue is in the name of the tough guy. He is called Yamamoto. Kitano clearly sees him as a latterday gangster twin to Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese navy who plotted the dawn raid on the US fleet.

"Not a lot of even Japanese people realise it, but this film is totally a metaphor of the Japanese military force in World War Two," Kitano told me when I interviewed him in Venice last autumn. "It's a metaphor of the Pearl Harbor incident. Yamamoto in the film knows he has a good chance of winning the battle with the small-time gangsters, Hispanic street punks and people like that. But he knows, too, that if he goes to war with the Italian Mafia, there's no chance of winning."

This seemed at the time like another of Kitano's conceits dreamed up for the benefit of western journalists. The maverick 53-year-old auteur-comedian is notorious for spinning yarns to the press. Although he speaks perfectly adequate English, he gives his interviews in Japanese. When he gets bored of being asked the same questions (which generally hinge on his kinetic, celebratory approach to violence), he'll answer straight-faced in gobbledegook. The interpreter will then just repeat the standard answer which Kitano gave the first time he asked the question and the journalist won't even realise he or she is being mocked.

As if curious to see what fresh labels film critics will pin to him, Kitano often makes lofty and improbable claims for his films. Most critics saw traces of Chaplin's The Kid in Kikujiro (1999), his comic, surrealist road movie about a small boy and a crumpled old yakuza who embark on a cross country trip together. The real point of departure, Kitano insisted a little fancifully, was not Chaplin but The Wizard Of Oz. In the case of Brother, though, the Pearl Harbor comparison stacks up. The mood of the film is one of deadpan fatalism. As Kitano puts it: "It's about this guy Yamamoto whose family in Japan has ceased to exist. In that sense, he is already dead in Japan. He goes to America to look for the right place and the right time to die."

Admiral Yamamoto shared exactly the same sense of impending disaster as his yakuza namesake. He knew, just as Kitano's gangster did, that he'd eventually be made to pay for provoking the big, bad Americans' wrath. Said the Admiral, once the attack he had so scrupulously planned was completed: "We have awakened a sleeping giant and have installed in him a terrible resolve."

In tactical terms, the assault on Pearl Harbor was a stunning success. Yamomoto's men sunk or damaged 21 ships of the US Pacific Fleet. They killed 2,403 Americans with only minimal losses themselves (whatever gloss Bruckheimer and Bay try to put on the battle) and achieved a spectacular propaganda coup in the process.

However, Yamamoto, who had tried to talk his superiors out of mounting such an attack, refused to gloat. He realised that Pearl Harbor was the beginning of the end for the Japanese. Having worked as a naval attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington earlier in his career, he appreciated the full extent of Uncle Sam's military and industrial strength, and had no illusions about how the US would react to such an act of unprovoked aggression. More than a year before Pearl Harbor, Yamomoto had predicted what might happen if the Japanese provoked the western allies. Interviewed in 1940, he noted gloomily, "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."

Admiral Yamomoto's end was predictable and tragic. After Pearl Harbor, the Americans vowed to kill him. In the spring of 1943, they finally had their chance. A fleet of 18 American P-38s from the 13th Air Force tracked his flight to the Japanese base on Bougainville, intercepted him, and blew him to kingdom come.

It would be saying too much to reveal what happens to Kitano's Yamomoto at the end of Brother. Suffice it to say that the gangster boss, like the Imperial Emperor, is a reluctant warrior who knows well in advance what his destiny is bound to be.

The Pearl Harbor allegory lends depth and pathos to Kitano's movie, which might otherwise have seemed like just another yakuza thriller.

It also enables the writer-director to make some sly digs at the expense of the Americans. If Kitano really is supposed to be a counterpart to Yamomoto, that means that General Douglas MacArthur's American army is represented by the trigger-happy hoodlums of the Italian Mafia, determined to make their superiority in numbers and firepower count against their upstart Japanese rivals. In other words, this is not a case of war heroes bravely fighting back against an evil enemy, but of gangsters killing gangsters. It's hardly an interpretation of US history that is likely to appeal to either Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay.

'Brother' is released today