Excellent SFX and suitable actors can almost make up for silly dialog, stupid story, and patriotic hysteria

Rating: 5/10 (15 October 2001)

There are nice points. We have, after all, Disney and ILM. They do what their standard requires in visual effects. Sound effects are also great, and if you've got Dolby in your theater, you're up to some good sound. Mark Hamill is quoted as saying that he suspects George Lucas would do without actors were it technically possible. PH's casting people know better than that. They remember how a well-cast Crowe made women fell in love with the otherwise unremarkable Gladiator. Patented female attractors Hartnett and Affleck do their job of bringnin some money out of ladies' purses and into the box office.
That's about it. Everything else is dreadful. Story's a mix of the simplest of love triangles, and "dead lover turns out to be alive" routine. 'Trivial' would be a huge understatement. The lines are stupid enough to make an idiot turn red. Acting is mostly helpless, but for crying in a bucket, how can you expect one to look following the flapdoodle in the script. I found it hard to feel for any of the people in the movie, American or Japanese, with the possible exclusion of Danny.
Ridiculously pompous patriotic gibberish that follows the bombing is a nightmare. It reminds me of the worst Soviet specimen of the genre. First the movie forgets about Japanese atrocities in Asia then takes the cry to such heights that what Americans did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki would seem justified.
The movie evades the real question: how a thing like Pearl Harbor could happen. US have cut up Japanese oil supply. Almost entire American fleet in the Pacific is at dock at Pearl Harbor, and a Japanese fleet disappears suddenly. Where would they be heading? Oh there's a serious problem... Let me think... How about... uh, Pearl Harbor?
The usual review goes "it may not be quite historically accurate, but" etc etc etc. It is NOWHERE near historically accurate, period. Go watch it, girls enjoy the star hunks, everyone enjoy the effects. Then put what you saw on a shelf of your memory labelled "FAKES" and rent "Tora, Tora, Tora".

If you want a war movie, the greatest of all time is "Come and See". I doubt you'll ever want to see another war movie again.
5/10