Appalling.

Rating: 1/10 (12 September 2010)

Appalling.
Four minutes into the movie, Michael Bay starts with the cheesy lines and overblown melodrama. What is with this guy and his cheesy overblown melodramatic romances? He's making George Lucas look like Shakespeare and James Cameron look like Michael Curtiz. This movie is an abomination. Michael Bay is romanticizing what's happening on Pearl Harbor, using and manipulating this dreadful events for his own advantage to sell tickets. He throws in cliché after cliché and never once tries to tell a story. And he rips off greater directors and their films rather than trying to make his own. For instance, is it just me, or does the dogfight earlier seem vaguely familiar? He's ripping right off Star Wars! I'm not talking borrowing tiny elements or being vaguely familiar, I'm talking ripping right from the movie, almost shot for shot! And even using the same lines! Halfway through this movie, I had to ask myself one question: is Bay really using the tragedy at Pearl Harbor as a tool for this romance? I'm assuming he was trying to show how this tragedy affected real people, but this movie is way more about the romance than it is about the bombings! I feel like he *wants* to put the human element in, but he's not! He's completely removing it by giving us so much horrible melodrama. There is just this constant bombardment of melodramatic nonsense! Would it be so much to ask for him to at least stick to one story by the way? Half the time he's giving us this beyond-cheesy romance, but then he'll randomly cut to the Japanese military and US intelligence. Stick to one story! It kind of depletes the purpose of having us fear for the attacks if he's going to show us when and exactly how the Japanese are going to strike. He does not know how to balance the war aspect of this movie with the romance aspect. He either needs to stick to one or the other and not try to do both! And he rips off so many great movies it is pathetic. Bay very blatantly tries to rip off James Cameron's Titanic, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and George Lucas's Star Wars. Unfortunately, he has none of Cameron's eye for visuals, Spielberg's finesse with emotion and camera-work, or Lucas's talent for characters and action. And here is something else I noticed while I'm stuck on the director himself: he does not give the audience a sense of what it was like to be on board any of the ships before bombing them. So, we don't really feel an emotional connection to the ships or anyone on-board. By the way, Mr. Bay, could you please stop moving the camera? I feel like the movie is drifting away from me!! Now then, as I said before, I don't feel like director Bay or screenwriter Randall Wallace did their military research before starting filming. Did pilots ever play chicken with the enemy? I highly doubt that. And I really hated the way he made the pilots seem stupid, not knowing their right from their left. It is very obvious to me that he did none of the proper research for this movie.
Pearl Harbor has one of the worst and most awfully clichéd scripts I've ever heard in my life. These lines that the actors have to say are just plain god awful, no other way around it. I seriously think Bay was trying to squeeze as many clichés as possible into the first half hour. In the first half hour of the movie, I counted no fewer than twenty clichés. I mean, this screenplay was just embarrassingly bad. There's no other way to say it. He should be ashamed of this screenplay.
As for the actors in this film, I hated them all. I didn't enjoy watching them on screen, they were stupid characters, and none of them carried any kind of emotional authenticity with them. They were all as shallow and selfish and pitiful as any character I've ever seen on screen. We're given no other reason to care about any of them other than that they are in love with each other.
And why does this movie hate women so much? I have never seen a movie that hated women as much as this movie does. All the women in this movie want are men. They joined the military to meet men. And every time we see a woman she's talking about men. Are these women really that shallow? All they ever talk about is sex and men! And then in the operating room, they're all just incompetent and panicky. Why does Bay hate women so much?? Now, I am going to give this movie a point for some pretty decent art direction and visual effects. Doesn't have anything on Saving Private Ryan, though. And I really wish this movie had paid as much attention to its dialogue, story, characters, historical accuracies, and general logic as it does to its effects and art direction. In fact, everything else about this movie is so bad that by the time we get to those scenes, I don't even care about them. And Bay doesn't really give us a whole lot of time to look at them. He's just running everything around too haphazardly.
Also, the visuals are pretty good, but I don't feel like I'm a part of this war like I did with other war films.
Bay epically fails with his monstrosity of a motion picture Pearl Harbor. This is among the worst films I've ever seen. Even its good portions-like its music and art direction-are dragged under by the weight of the horrible direction and writing. What the audience is left with is a movie whose good parts are still degenerating factors because they were used merely to try to distract the audience from all its other short-comings.
1/10