[1941] is an overblown repetitive, cartoon-style satire that runs into the ground a good hour before it ends. Yet there are things to be prized in it…. Set in Los Angeles the week after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 1941 jumps back and forth among a dozen or so parallel stories, all of them illustrating the confusion, incompetence, and nutty panic of a people expecting Japanese invasion at any moment. The movie is fun because Spielberg takes a fondly appreciative attitude toward the innocent righteousness of the time. He's made an homage to the gung-ho silliness of old war movies, a celebration of the Betty Grable-Betty Hutton period of American pop culture. In this movie, America is still a very young country—foolish, violent, casually destructive, but not venal. That we joke about a moment of national crisis shows we are still young—and sane….

1941 looks like a series of...