I like Michael Bay's style but this movie was not worth the hype

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2001)

I am going on the record early on just so you do not think I like everything Michael Bay has directed. It was a very mensa-mensa movie. About thirty minutes of the movie was really good (i.e. the attack). But even here it failed to achieve the emotional intensity of the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. The rest was a rip-off of the old movie (insert any name of any 1940s war movie--I pick Test Pilot). In addition, the love story might've been interesting but was so poorly written that I did not even care about the characters, with the exception of Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Dan Aykroyd who were both on the screen way too little. Michael Bay's place is with Action movies with humor--not heavy pieces like this, which would have been more reverentially directed by a director of higher caliber, Spielberg for example.