CREDITS PEARL HARBOR , 2001 dir: Michael Bay Ben Affleck Josh Hartnett Kate Beckinsale Jennifer Garner Cuba Gooding Jr Jon Voight Ewen Bremner Alec Baldwin Tom Sizemore Dan Aykroyd William Fichtner

A sudsily fictitious romance set against a historic tragedy that cost hundreds of lives. What were they thinking of? Hardly a failure, but with a launch party alone that cost $3 million, it wasn’t the titanic hit intended. Michael Bay’s slam-bang epic is photographed in eye-popping colours that will leave bruises on your retina.

Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, is now a historical site. US Arizona, sunk in the raid, still lies at the bottom of the harbour and has been turned into a permanent memorial, open most days of the year, with free admission. It’s about 45 minutes west of Waikiki on the Kamehameha Highway, Highway 99. The end of the movie features underwater shots of the real US Arizona.

Most of the film was shot around California, including the ‘Tennessee’ fields of the opening, which are at Somis, between Thousand Oaks and Ventura, northwest of LA.

The movie kicks off on the East Coast, in New York. ‘Mitchell Field’, where Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) indulges the laddish antics of Rafe and Danny (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett), is Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley (just where are those mountains in the background supposed to be, then?). The airport (before redevelopment) was one of the few real locations (if not the only one) seen in Casablanca.

The steps of the hospital, where Rafe’s romantic gesture ends with a Champagne cork thwacking his already bruised nose, is the entrance to the old LA County Historical and Art Museum, now part of the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, south of downtown LA.

The ‘New York’ nightclub, where the pilots and nurses fraternise, is the Queen’s Salon (which used to be the First Class Lounge) of the Queen Mary, 1126 Queens Highway, permanently berthed in Long Beach. The interior of the Queen Mary was also a ‘New York’ nightclub in Ridley Scott’s Someone To Watch Over Me, and a ‘Manhattan’ bar in the Coens' Barton Fink.

Ironically, in the next scene, Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) is taken for a nighttime cruise around the Queen Mary, supposedly in ‘New York harbor’, where she dreams of being aboard the luxury ship.

Pearl Harbor: The ‘New York’ goodbye: Union Station, South Alameda Street, downtown Los Angeles

Rafe tells of his posting to ‘Eagle Squadron’ in England, and promises to come back, at Evelyn’s elegant ‘Manhattan’ hotel. And this is LA, too, downtown. The deco entrance and the lobby are the Los Angeles Design Center, 433 South Spring Street. Also downtown is the ‘New York’ railway station where Danny waves byebye to Rafe, which is Union Station, 800 North Alameda Street, which has featured in countless movies, including The Way We Were, The Driver and The Replacement Killers (where it was passed off as an airport).

Most famously, the station was transformed into the futuristic cop station for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

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HARD COPY: For the details of the filming locations of 1,600 of your favourite movies, check out The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations. 464 pages of fascinating facts, illustrated with over 1,000 original photographs.