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If it were up to me, Harrison Ford would stop calling me for career advice, the girls of Baywatch wouldn't constantly stake out my office on the off chance that they might catch a glimpse of me on my lunch break, and Hollywood would be incapable of producing genuinely pathetic and unfunny films. Unfortunately, though, it's not up to me, and thus we as Americans are graced with 1941. After screening 1941, I sat shaking my head, wondering how the filmmakers had expected me to both laugh and be entertained by the one-dimensional drivel that was occurring on screen during the course of the movie. Prior to this screening, I hadn't necessarily been anticipating a phenomenal movie like Citizen Kane or North by Northwest, but with Steven Spielberg attached to the project as director, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale as the screenwriters, and big names like Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, and John Belushi in the cast, I was expecting something along the lines of a smart, enjoyable comedy. Was I ever disappointed. Much like Michael Moore's 1993 release, Canadian Bacon, 1941 spotlights America's fear of having the continental United States invaded by a foreign nation. The film opens parodying the opening of Spielberg's Jaws. It is late at night. A young woman is seen skinny-dipping in the ocean. John Williams' familiar two note score is playing ominously in the background, when the woman is suddenly startledÖ by the periscope of a rogue Japanese submarine, some 50 yards offshore. The submarine's captain and crew, intent on destroying Hollywood to prove Japanese superiority, have eluded American radar contact and have nearly run aground in their haste to blow things up. The Japanese characters themselves are some of the most unimaginative, stupid, and offensively stereotypical characters as I've seen. They make comments about decreasing the size of American radios, generally operate their submarine the way a child might operate a boat ride at Kiddieland, and ultimately bomb a Ferris wheel at a Pacific coast amusement park, mistakenly thinking that it was part of Hollywood. Combined with four other sub-plots that are as weak and logical as 6 year old girls named Alice, and characters that it would be an overstatement to call even one dimensional, I sat and watched this film in deafening silence, unflinchingly starring at the decidedly unhumorous, uninteresting, and unbelievable events occurring on-screen. I don't think of myself as an intellectual along the lines of Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, but I felt truly insulted that Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Gale thought that I would a) accept the material at hand in 1941: watching American soldiers attempting to shoot out all the lights in Los Angeles because they believed there to be an air raid, and b) find it funny. Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Gale rebounded nicely from this debacle, but 1941 stands out in my mind, along with The Last Action Hero, as one of the biggest bombs of all time. Compared to 1941, even Hudson Hawk would appear to be Oscar worthy.
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