A round of applause for geKKo. What a find this “vintage” edit is! “Pearl Harbor” has always been one of those good-story-buried-somewhere-in-there films, and this effort by geKKo finds a way to get to one version of that good flick. There’s only really two ways to save the bloated cartoonish “Pearl Harbor” from it’s excesses. One is the “Strength and Honor” approach — make it a streamlined action-packed comrades-in-arms war-story heavy on caffeine and light on sugar. The other is to dive headfirst into embracing the goofy implausible love-triangle while trimming away a lot of blowing-shit-up for the sake of entertaining our modern adrenaline-junkie culture. Both paths acknowledge that in attempting to be both kinds of story the theatrical release of “Pearl Harbor” was unsatisfying as either. In this case geKKo’s stepping into a time-machine and going full-bore classic Hollywood wartime romance produces a movie that works well in ways I didn’t expect. It’s shameless cornball romanticism may still turn-off a lot of viewers, but without it this telling of the tale has no legs. By recasting the film as vintage B&W the cloying syrup seems far more appropriate for 1940-42, and makes this a wonderful throwback-to-yesteryear romance-flick for a rainy afternoon by a fire. In fact, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the vintage edition of “Pearl Harbor” bears a strong tonal resemblance to “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo”, which is a appropriate since that film is one of the defining pieces of overacted romance+heroism melodrama Hollywood produced during WWII. Well done geKKo. I look forward to watching your other B&W vintage fanedits.
