Pearl Harbor

I don't know how the thought of writing about this never occurred to me. Despite the million times I've watched it, the zillion tears I've shed for it, the many more times that I've craved for a love like this.

Everything about this movie gives me goose-flesh. The plot, the music, the wonderful visuals, but most of all, the love-story. The entwined lives of Danny, Evelyn and Rafe. I couldn't perhaps ever believe in love like Rafe again because I grew to believe things like that don't exist. I don't know a soul today who could tell his love all in the midst of feeling betrayed and cheated, " When I was lying half-dead, I made a deal with God. If I could just see you one more time, I would never ask for anything again. And you know what I'll keep my word." Rafe's love is something that would remain in my memory as the perfect example of true love. Selfless, Giving, yet so content with just the feeling of loving someone so much.

Evelyn's love for Rafe, half the world away, is something else which is so beautiful. The amount of solace she finds in his letters. Images of her sitting by the sunset, while she writes to Rafe " Every night I watch the sunset and soak up the last ounce of heat from its long tired day and send it from my heart to yours." Such a patient kind of love. Distant, yet constantly bound by thoughts. Being alone, yet never truly in the sense of the word, because Rafe's love was constantly with her. Something I still look at and smile, admiring the love she bears for him.

Evelyn and Danny's love-story is reminiscent of two teenagers falling in love. Torn by grief with the news of Rafe's death, finding complete solitude in the pathos within each other's hearts. Willingly letting each other pick up the broken pieces of their lives, trying to put it all back together, but silently worrying that war doesn't crush their lives again. So much of togetherness, in common pain, so much of love in the pangs of loneliness.

And finally, as death did do apart Rafe and Evelyn, it did bring them back together. Danny's death while trying to save Rafe seems like fate wanting Rafe to be with the woman he loved and reason he lived, for the rest of his life. It seems ironic when Evelyn tells Rafe before he and Danny leave for war, " I'll never stop loving you, but I'm going to give my heart to Danny. But I also can never look at another sunset without thinking of you.", Because the last scene of the movie, shows Rafe and Evelyn walk into the sunset together, as two lovers, as a family, as two people in whose hearts Danny will live forever.

Pearl Harbor, the movie, for me, will remain this ode to love, though it may for many others, simply remain as a recreation of what made America join the war. Every piece of music by Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for the movie leaves me with the image of the warm sunset. Of the love these three characters bore for each other. Of the kind of love, I wish I ever get to experience someday. Simple, Innocent, True, COMPLETE!