Titanic was Better

Rating: Null/10 (22 January 2002)

Imagine you've wanted to taste a new candy bar for about a year now. You've seen commercials on TV touting how good the candy bar tastes, and it sure looked great from what they showed. You wait an entire year for this new candy bar, reading all about it online, in magazines, in newspapers. You finally go to the store the day it comes out, you pay good money for it, and guess what, it tastes like sh**.
That is my experience with Pearl Harbor. Never have I been so duped into wasting ten bucks. The Pearl Harbor trailers gleamed with stunning scenes of war and emotion and tumultuous music (by Hans Zimmer, a self-stolen score from The Thin Red Line), and it ended up being the sappiest love story ever told with a half-hour of mind-numbing, seemingly pointless, sensationalistic violence. Titanic seemed more historically accurate. Titanic had a better screenplay. And Titanic had better acting. And Titanic is absolutely hands down the most overrated movie of the 90's, a corporate boob of pop culture's incessant urge to see pretty people say stupid but pretty things.
Pearl Harbor is the same, only ten times worse. The actors are like shiny dolls, not war heroes. The direction is choppy during the violence, to give us a sense of desparation and confusion, but instead it gives us a sense of boredom and disgust. Bodies falling everywhere may be historically accurate. But Pearl Harbor doesn't take the time to make us care about the main characters, let alone the falling bodies.
This movie is an insult to veterans. This movie is an insult to African Americans, and Cuba Gooding Jr. should be ashamed for taking the sloppiest representation of a token black male in cinema history. This movie is an insult to film buffs, who have watched good war movies for decades. This movie is an insult to humanity. You'd spend your time better shoving the popcorn up your butt.