BOMBS AWAY : 'Pearl Harbor'.

One way to see Pearl Harbor is as the opening salvo in this season's blockbuster wars--a consummate action film, all high-tech mayhem and bodies flying like popcorn. Another way to see it is as a crowning achievement in the effort to undo three decades of cinematic alienation and get the war movie genre back on the track of patriotic glory.

The crucial year for Vietnam-influenced war movies was 1970--the year of Kent State, and of M*A*S*H and Catch-22, two films that harnessed our agonized revulsion at Vietnam and turned it toward a revisionist scrutiny of earlier wars. War films that complicate or demystify military heroism predate Vietnam, of course. From Here to Eternity (1953) presented the army, that hugely messy democratizing institution, as war itself, a cauldron of class and ethnic tensions; The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), with William Holden as a bomber pilot unable to square the violence of war with the prospect of his happy American family back home, portrayed Korea as "a tragedy" and "a dirty job." But these movies fell back in the end on affirmations, partly salvaging anti-heroic deaths (Montgomery Clift shot in a golf course sandtrap; Holden in a muddy ditch) with hero-making epitaphs of the kind Burt Lancaster utters in Eternity ("He was a good solider, sir. He loved the army more than any soldier I knew"). Even The Dirty Dozen (1967), which grafted a cynical Vietnam message onto WW II--that war is murder, dirty work we leave to society's "scum"--left you cheering for the boys to pull it off.

M*A*S*H and Catch-22, however, obliterated heroism, pushing beyond cynicism into absurdity; and the antiwar war films to follow went further, into insanity. Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Big Red One, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Thin Red Line: the films that define the post-1970 war movie are morally dark, profoundly alienated works created by visionary/rebel younger directors. The Vietnam worldview required not a Fred Zinneman or Robert Aldrich, but Kubrick, Coppola, Stone, Malick. Set on the brink of nihilism, with acid rock replacing the old martial melodies, the vision was not upward into sun and clouds, but downward into mud and agony. War was terrifying, the soldier an animal writhing in his own fear. These films lingered on the details of physical discomfort (Charlie Sheen in Platoon, passing out from overexertion while slapping at ants biting his neck), and matched them to an absolute failure of deeper, moral comforts. The aims of war were obscure at best, your fate lay in the hands of fools (or worse); and back home your girlfriend, far from awaiting your heroic return, was sleeping with someone else. Vietnam-inspired films mounted an assault on patriotism, asserting a universal capacity for evil that made Heart of Darkness the emblematic Vietnam text, and scripting the testimony of the soldier-witness--whether the outrage of Tom Cruise's paraplegic vet in Born on the Fourth or the haunted metaphysical voiceovers in The Thin Red Line--as one of brutal, total disillusion.

The eighties brought a backlash. Reagan/Bush conservatism recast the military in the old, heroic mode, culminating in Desert Storm, an effort mirrored in films ranging from the Rambo movies, to Top Gun and The Right Stuff, to Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge. This effort to reverse the despised "malaise" of the seventies has continued apace, part of the culture wars of the past twenty years; and it's in this context that Pearl Harbor, a patently lightweight movie, proves a heavy lifter, a benchmark in the restoration of patriotic mythmaking.

From the start, Pearl Harbor, a $135-million extravaganza by the producer-director team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Rock), sets us down in a nostalgia-drenched, fantasyland America, the opening scenes painting a Norman Rockwell-like portrait of two boys--best friends--on a farm in the South in 1923. Fooling around in cropduster dad's plane, donning aviator's caps with earflaps, the boys press a wrong button and go careening across golden wheat fields, jubilantly shouting, "We're flying!" Now cut to 1941, and Rafe and Danny (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) have grown up into Army Air Corps fighter pilots--both stationed on Pearl Harbor, both in love with the same woman, and both chomping at the bit to turn aerial daredevilry into heroism.

Pearl Harbor is a museum of WWII-era Americana: big band dances, Army nurses, lots of colorful '40s fashions, and goodbye kisses on train platforms. The flyboys take their dates up in their planes at sunset; an aura of merry fraternal pranksterism pervades, tempered by aw-shucks shyness around girls ("I got some genuine French champagne--from France"). Meanwhile, we keep cutting to the council of black-clad Japanese generals--announced with an ominous drumbeat and screen-filling shots of the imperial flag--grimly plotting their attack. It's the Japanese war machine against a ragtag band of farmboys in hula shirts. "I didn't even know the Japs were sore at us!" one of our boys yells as the Zeros roar by. "They're kicking our butt! Let's get in the airplanes!"

Such contrasts stroke our sense of folksy, slapdash American bravery, indulging our fantasy of being the underdog, dangerously underestimated. "If there are more like you," a British officer tells Rafe when he does a stint flying for the RAF, "God help anyone who goes to war with America." Pearl Harbor is full of that kind of sentiment--a cinematic boy's story, through and through. When Cuba Gooding, playing a proud African American cook, complains bitterly that he's never been allowed to fire a weapon, we know he'll get his vindication during the chaos of the attack. When Rafe and Danny pull a dangerous aerial game of chicken during training, and are reprimanded--with a wink--by their colonel (Alec Baldwin), we know we'll see the stunt again--only next time to the detriment of some unlucky Japanese pilots.

It's all high spirits and cute story lines and swelling music, and, at the end, a shot at a glorious soldier's death, a chance to join, as a closing voiceover intones, "The Brotherhood of Heroes." Pearl Harbor returns us to the kind of war movie that calls time out for dying-buddy soliloquies amid the flying bullets. It puts all the old reassurances back in, the ones those seventies films took out.

It's startling to see an essentially nineteenth-century romantic vision assembled so faithfully in a twenty-first century film. And discouraging, too. Not because Pearl Harbor is such a negligible movie (though it is), but because the bleakness of the post-1970 war movies, their claw-like grip on the moral ambiguity of power, didn't come easily to America, and seeing the war-as-glory ethos revived this way feels like a lot of work being undone. The darkness of the Vietnam films contained hard-won insights that shouldn't be made light of. For instance, missing wholly from Pearl Harbor--deeply inimical to it--is any trace of the earlier films' critique of male authority. Put the gung-ho pep talk by Baldwin up against Nick Nolte's performance in The Thin Red Line, as an officer confronted (by John Cusack) over his eagerness to send men to their deaths. Nolte's belligerent soliloquy of ambition and macho bluster is a chilling portrayal of mixed motives that makes Baldwin's scenes, indeed his entire character, look and sound like a fairy tale.

Some will say I'm missing the point of Pearl Harbor, a generational tribute at a demographic moment in which "the silent artillery of time," as Lincoln called it, is taking out over 400,000 American WWII vets each year. But is turning war back into a fairy tale the best way to pay this tribute? At movie's end, following a shot of the battleship Arizona, grown over with weeds at the bottom of the harbor, we revisit that same Norman Rockwell farm, where another boy, wearing that same aviator's cap, is learning to fly, a new generation of sons being grown for the next harvest of glory.

It's easy enough to shrug off Pearl Harbor's sentimental glory-making as mere entertainment, harmless nostalgia, or marketing (Hasbro is bringing out a line of Pearl Harbor G.I. Joes). But maybe it should make us at least slightly nervous. In the lobby after the movie I ran into a friend and his ten-year-old son. How did he like it? I asked the boy.

Cool, he said, with a huge grin.