Nothing original here.

Rating: 5/10 (24 June 2001)

Before I went to see "Pearl Harbor", a friend of mine told me to be prepared to be disappointed. She was right. There was nothing new here; nothing original. The story leading up to the absolutely unrelated attack on Pearl Harbor was reminiscent of "From Here to Eternity", which had much better subplotting and character development. The ship-sinking scenes reeked of "Titanic," and the scenes of nurses and corpsman trying to stop patients from bleeding were poor imitations of "Saving Private Ryan." Not to mention the depiction of the Japanese war planners, which made them appear to be the Hollywood stereotypical "mysterious oriental", straight out of "Tora Tora Tora" and other such films. Michael Bay's direction of this fiasco gave the entire movie the look and feel of "Armageddon" all over again -- from the music to the poses to the heroics -- way too melodramatic. The only reason I rated this movie "7" was because of the spectacular attack sequence at Pearl Harbor. Otherwise, it would've garnered about a "5".