Pearl Harbor as Armageddon

Rating: 1/10 (6 July 2001)

Every bomb hits the target, every explosion results in a huge fireball, and every bullet finds it's target, regardless of how it was delivered or lined up.
It was really difficult to see an actual historical event turned into a Hollywood action film with all its preposterous battle hoopla. I've seen interviews with Pearl Harbor survivors who say that the movie is pretty accurate. This rather amazes me. Either they have forgotten the details of the event, or they may not have actually been there. My father was there. The battleships were tied together with walkways between them and to the dock. There was no way that Japanese planes were going to fly between the ships, below the deck level, the length of the ships, but they did this repeatedly in the movie. Dive bombers did half immelmanns to attack. I doubt this was ever done in actual combat. Bombs fell straight down, a physical impossibility when delivered from a moving airplane. Wasn't it amazing how all those guys who went through flight training together were always assigned to the same duty stations? Pearl Harbor had such potential, with todays technology, but in the hands of an adolescent director, the result was quite pathetic.
Alec Balwin's portrayal of the phenomenonly heroic Jimmie Doolittle was overly theatrical and moronic. There was audible laughter in the theater during his major "speech." Anyone who would cast him as an American patriot is an idiot.
I am willing to "check my brain at the door" to enjoy "Animal House", or even "The Animal," but don't ask me to do this to view an historical drama.