A damn good film...nuts to anyone that dosen't like it.

Rating: Null/10 (11 August 2002)

Why everybody says this is a bad movie, I have no idea. I think it's very well done. I saw it once in the theater, thought it was good, I got the Vista Series DVD edition, watched it on that and thought it was great.

The number one complaint I hear is that the main focus is the love story. What in the heck was wrong with it? It showed the America before the attack, innocent, carefree, but in the back of their minds, they knew there was a war out there, and they knew it could come to them. If they just had the movie be about the event, there would be no reason to care, it would have been impossible to establish how big the event was and have any characters for us to care about at all. When they revolved the event around a love triangle between 3 characters, they made it relatable. Pearl Harbor hit the ordinary events of their lives like a sledgehammer, making everything else in their lives seem insignificant, which is a whole lot more relatable to me since 9/11. Another complaint is including the story of the mission to bomb Tokyo. Well I was born in '83, and am not a big history buff, so that whole part of the story was fresh and exciting to me.
As far as the actual historical events of Pearl Harbor, and the Doolittle bombing of Tokyo, they were breathtaking. The special effects were flawless. It showed the sheer terror and chaos of those events. I had to watch the "making of" documentary to separate what was real and what was the work of ILM.
I will admit that the representation of the Japanese are the biggest flaws with this picture. Japan didn't attack us for the reason they gave in the film. They were not sad that they had to bomb the U.S., in fact they celebrated the attack. And the final flaw was the lack of the abundant amount of Japanese American citizens that were living in Hawaii at the time.
Despite those flaws, I think that Pearl Harbor is a wonderful movie that I only put second to Lord of the Rings as the best film of 2001.