The Good & Bad Of 'Pearl Harbor'

Rating: 5/10 (4 July 2006)

THE GOOD - This is beautifully filmed, and a sharp DVD print really brings out the brilliant colors in here. The action scenes are awesome, although it takes awhile to get to them. I didn't mind because the love story is better than normal, thanks to Kate Beckinsale, with that 1940s glamour look and dress. She never looked as pretty as this - just spectacular. Josh Harnett and Ben Affleck play likable-enough characters and the supporting cast is good. The film got panned because it didn't go into enough details about the war strategy but films that had done that in the past had wound up boring, so they made the right move here.
THE BAD - This is almost too much believe, except I saw it for my own eyes. The idiots who wrote this movie - Liberal history revisionists, I presume - make the attacking Japanese almost look like the good guys! This is either political correctness gone amok or downright anti-American propaganda that should have USA viewers upset, to say the least. Excuse me, but all eyewitness accounts (and common sense) do NOT have the Japanese pilots happily waving at kids just before dropping bombs. That, and almost making it sound like poor Japan had no choice in what it was doing, is an incredible insult to American viewers and those who lost their lives in that unprovoked incident.
OVERALL - The latter ruins making this glossy and interesting movie a "keeper."