Not since Pearl Harbor have more bombs been dropped!!!

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2001)

Since seeing Saving Private Ryan, I've been waiting for a war film to match up. It didn't happen with this turkey! Having been bombarded (no pun intended) by the trailers for Pearl Harbor for about five months, I was sure this was going to be great production. But not since seeing the Sun set in the west in The Green Berets have I been so outraged at having dropped twenty dollars! I had the impression that the film was about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. SILLY ME!!!! Actually, in a three hour film, anything remotely relavant to Pearl Harbor lasts about 35 minutes. There's an hour and a half of sophomoric love triangle between Affleck and Kate Beckinsale (who is'nt hard to look at!) and Josh Hartnett with the "who will live to get the girl!!!" angle (she can't have both!!) coupled with 20 minutes of childhood memories which I guess fell into the category of character development and about thirty minutes (the best minutes of the film) about Doolittle's raid on Tokyo. Bruckheimer must have been asleep while directing this film and after 10 minutes of love interest schlock, you should be too. Affleck looked as if he'd been bitten by a Tsetse fly and Jon Voight was almost nightmarish in his portrayal of FDR. I know Cuba Gooding Jr. was cast in the film for a reason, but since his role consisted of a boxing match and machine gunning a couple of Zero's, you wonder why he took the role. Oh yeah, did you catch the phrase "totally" which was used twice in the film, a la "Valley Girls???" Geez, I thought this was the 1940's!!! This film was so bad that even the wardrobes looked sloppy, uniforms that were ill fitting, hair styles that were sometimes questionable and hey, the SOUNDTRACK!!! (or lack of it!!) This would have been a perfect time to showcase the fantastic music of the 1940's and have it come alive for younger viewers that had never heard that music, but the soundtrack was conspicuous by it's abscence!! Almost like they did'nt want to pay the royalties for anything authentic, I think I heard about eight bars of Cole Porter and the rest sounded like 1941 Muzak!! I DID like the special effects and hats off the FX crew for their STUNNING performance!!! Quite a visual experience. In closing, there was a real missed opportunity here to entertain and inform, but instead we were offered "Days of Our Lives" mated up with "McHale's Navy!" Any historical perspective was avoided and I understand Disney is re editing the film for Japanese audiences to soften any suggestion that Imperial Japan was an aggressor in that era. At the rate our educational system is failing to give children a firm anchor in history, it's doubly sad that this film fell so short of the mark. In addition, I was hoping our World War II veterans and particulary Pearl Harbor veterans would have been more directly honored in the film. They ARE the Greatest Generation!! Well, I guess I'll just sit back and wait for the next attempt and hope Disney has nothing to do with it!! (Walt WOULD'NT be happy!!)