The Bomb That Started WWII

I’m a fan of Steven Speilberg. Sure, he has occasionally made a boring film (The Terminal) or two (Munich), but nevertheless, I can think of no other major director who is so prolific, and yet maintains a very high level of quality overall.

Over the years, I’d hear a little snippet here and there looking down on one of his earlier efforts, the World War II-themed comedy 1941. And recently, I learned that the screenplay for the film was written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the men behind my favorite film, Back to the Future. I decided that I had to give it a shot.

What can I say? Sometimes, some very talented people do very bad work.

The script for 1941 is an overpopulated, disjointed mess. Set in Southern California in the days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the film loosely follows a massive cast of characters concerned that they might be the next target. (And they’re not crazy; the film also tracks the screw-up crew of a Japanese submarine that’s trying to find Hollywood so they can attack it.) The script is more concerned with little vignettes about different characters than it is about driving the narrative forward, and thinks it’s far more funny than it is. The film seemed like it was trying to be broadly comical in the style of Airplane! (though that film was made a couple years after this one), but almost none of the jokes are funny.

The cast of the film is truly staggering, both in the long list of recognizable names and faces present, and in the impossibility that none of them manage to generate any laughs. There’s Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Robert Stack, Treat Williams, John Candy, and more – and while none of them are “bad,” all are just plain boring. (And perhaps that’s even worse in this context.)

I can really find only two things to recommend about 1941. First, composer John Williams was on the top of his game in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and this film is no exception. He delivers a rousing, adventurous score every bit as worthy as the more well-known work he was doing at the time (and he even briefly references his own Jaws theme at the top of the film).

Secondly, the visual effects are pretty astounding. Not necessarily in terms of convincing quality, because three decades have gone by, and it’s pretty obvious when you’re looking at models. But to think that so many models, and so elaborately detailed, were created (and often destroyed) in the service of a movie like this makes the mind buckle. There looks to be as much money on the screen here as there was in Star Wars or Superman, and it takes on “holy crap!” proportions by the end of the movie. There’s just something about knowing that all this stuff actually existed somewhere that is lost completely in the modern era of computer generated images.

But that’s hardly enough to save what surely must be Steven Spielberg’s worst movie. Yes, worse than A.I. I rate it a D-, in fact, which should appropriately caution you to stay away from this film until you’re trying to complete a quest to see every movie the otherwise very talented man has ever made.