In the tradition of "Titanic," sorry to say

Rating: Null/10 (26 May 2001)

Actually, I liked this one better than James Cameron's "Titanic," but only liked it. It's the kind of movie that, like popcorn, is okay while your eating it, but doesn't leave you very full.
The film's centerpiece, the attack on Pearl Harbor, is a special effects gold mine that generally comes off fairly well, although some of the stuff, like Japanese planes flying on their sides in between buildings, was a little silly looking. And every vehicle that was hit did NOT explode like a gasoline tanker truck. Following bombs down from a "bomb's eye view" also seemed a little silly.
But in general, the scene went well.
What went less well was the rest of the movie. For me, the love triangle around which the film was built came off as largely what it was, simply a vehicle to carry the story along to the Cameron/Spielberg style "big scene." For me, the problem was not the idea, but the execution.
All three of the protagonists gave rather lifeless performances.
Ben Afleck has done better work other places and always seems to me more suited to bad guy roles than he is to playing the hero. It's part of the problem with modern movies, though. There seem to be no Jimmy Stewarts or Henry Fondas or James Cagneys around, no larger than life personalities who can take these mediocre characters and lift them up. Josh Harnett was even weaker and other than being good looking, I simply didn't get what the girl saw in him.
Kate Beckensale, who I have liked in many roles in the past, including "Brokedown Palace," "Last Days of Disco," and her British work, fails here in my view, underplaying most of her big scenes. Maybe it's the fact that she was a cardboard character, the Army nurse with no backstory to build upon, but she simply missed here, with the exception of her scene during the battle, where she got it together to some extent, but not completely. I expected better work from her.
But the acting was universally flat among the three of them, and that usually points a finger at a director. Like Cameron, Spielberg and DeMille before them, big picture, spectacle directors usually aren't all that good at getting things out of actors and Bay seems to be in that mold -- better at blowing things up than whittling things down to their emotional cores.
I give it a good, solid "B". It's entertaining, but not enlightening. I still feel a lot more for Henry Fonda's character in "Mr. Roberts." We never see him die, never see a shot fired in the whole movie, but he comes off as much more of a war hero than anyone in "Pearl Harbor."