A Little Dry if You're Looking for Accuracy. Unbelievable if You are Just Looking for a Good Story.

Rating: 10/10 (24 June 2008)

I first came about watching this movie after seeing an episode on MTV of I Love the New Millennium in which they described it as 'having a lot of stuff blow up' and it being the 'death of Afleck's career.' I had some time to kill, so I dug out the old VHS that we had of Pearl Harbor and started playing it. I was surprised that it was a Michael Bay film at first, for I am a fan of his work and didn't think he was into historical events.
The first half hour or so, I was appalled with the film work and bored with Afleck's relationship with Beckensale's character. Once his character of 'killed off' I started to actually get into the movie. I found that I was very emotionally drawn to the struggle of everyone in this film. The emphasis on color during the bombing scenes, and the artistic approach taken when filming the Arizona going down really touched me, as I have an uncle that is still entombed in the ill fated ship.
Once I got to the end, with the scenes in the rice paddies, I was ready for something to happen. The whole movie had been leading up to this point and I thought sure one of the boys was going down. Sure enough, one did, and I found myself crying, actually crying for the rest of the movie.
Historical accuracies and made up characters aside, a lot of us nowadays know a little about what happened at Pearl Harbor to know how devastating an event it was. This movie, if you let it, brings to life a little bit of what it was like, and continues to be like in some places, for soldiers around the world. In my opinion, it's a wonderful movie that gave me a new perspective on war with the added bonus of my favorite kind of film, a love story.