Pearl Harbor, the film

I’ve just finished watching Pearl Harbor and I am shocked… My eyes are still red, my mouth half opened, my heart beats are different from the normal ones.

I am neither fond of films nor of history. I’ve watched the film in order to get another point of view, another idea about the attack and to finish my “Guided Work of History” which is titled “The entrance of United States to the Second World War after the Japanese attack towards Pearl Harbor”. So, that’s why I hadn’t watched the film before, and also because if I have to choose a film, I never choose the ones with so violent and cruel scenes.

The film is really good. Great effects, very catching, shows history while showing this love story… I liked it! But the scenes are very shocking. The whole films shows a violent atmosphere, attacks, bombs, everything is very energetic, a lot of movements, screams, and that kind of desperation signals.

I’ve cried several times, and really cried! I still have the image of the burned people, all black, desperately running to the hospital to get some help. The huge mass of people floating on the sea, being filmed by down the water. It’s horrible to see so many legs moving so quickly… You get mad! Then the great masses of fire, of explosions, people being thrown backwards by the bombs, everything burning… People running, screaming, looking to the sky, mouths opened wide, desperation. Only desperation.

I must say that luckily, I didn’t see many children suffering. If that had happened, it would have been really worse. But there are some images that were shown together that really caught my attention – and children are involved.

When the Japanese planes were arriving to Pearl Harbor, minutes before 8 a.m. on December the 7th, we can see people taking up their habitual activities, and watching the planes approaching. We can see this woman (right) tiding up clothes in her garden and a whole lot of planes just passing above her. The woman gets really scared. What would you do, what would you think if that happened to you? Then we can see three little girls playing, dressed as angels, with wings on their costumes, and they also get surprised by these terrible aeroplanes with red circles on their sides. Also we can see in another part, some boys playing, and the planes passing just some meters above them. Those images are terrible!! Poor kids! They don’t know what is going on, what is happening, why are those planes there. They might find it interesting, funny to see 300 planes flying so close to them, but they really don’t understand what is going to come. A great contrast is shown between all these people living normally, doing what they should be doing a Sunday at 8 a.m., and the huge attack about to start. Kids were playing out there, a woman was tiding her clothes, some were sleeping, others working, and seconds later they were all dead! Who could have imagined?

War is something so ugly, so grey, so terrible, so negative. It is the giant weapon, the arm that can kill many people, many things with just one shot. War times are the worst ones, the saddest, the emptiest of life. Why killing that much? Why destroying like that our human race?

In these war times I only see helmets, missiles, blood, tanks and death, a lot of death, sadness and desperation. Innocent people running for their lives, innocent people screaming and suffering. It is not physical pain which really aches, it is more than that. It is the soul pain. The bullet that killed a man, the same bullet that destroyed a family, the same bullet that destroyed a soul; a soul and a lot more. The same damn bullet that takes our loved people, the one that makes us cry and scream deaths. The one which takes so many good people, so many people we love, we need, we’ll miss, and are innocents.


Times of war, outrageous times, black times. Fields with motionless bodies, the earth dyed in red and homes flooding with tears. Even though, there is a scream that nobody listens, such a loud scream that reaches the whole world, but nobody helps. The scream of mothers who loose sons, of girls who loose boyfriends, brothers and friends. The scream provoked by this enormously killing.

Innocents die, innocents suffer, innocents scream. And nobody helps, nobody stops all this. Nobody sets a “stop” to so many deaths. Little by little we must start and try to change the world.

No more blood, no more deaths, stop screams, stop weeping. We want green grass, not red land. We need love. Stop war, we want peace.

Slowly, my eyes went normal again, I breathe, and my heart beats normally. It has been a very rough, hard, violent and totally reflexive film. Now I’ll go to sleep and those horrible images will still be present in my head. I’m sure that I’ll dream about it, as it always happens.

Vale