Rude Japanese Interrupt Love Affair.

Rating: 3/10 (8 March 2009)

It cost roughly $140 million to produce this chimera. At the rate of my current income, that would sustain me for 12,727,272 years. No kidding.
Well, so it had a monstrous budget and professionally competent actors, but it's not worth much mention. I suppose it accomplished its goal, which was to use computer-generated effects and make money.
Its chief utility may be to introduce kids to some elementary facts about World War II. It wasn't designed to do it, but kids may need all the help they can get. A recent poll showed an alarming percentage of high school students didn't know who fought whom. A goodly number thought we and the Germans fought the Russians. Does that constitute a red flag or what? Basically this is a movie about a nurse who loves two men, only one of which manages to survive the Doolittle raid on Japan. If you're interested in love affairs and that sort of thing, this is your kind of movie. The CGIs are nice and exciting. That ought to hold the interest if nothing else does. Ka-BOOM.
For the record, Admiral Yamamoto never said, "I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." That was invented for the film "Tora, Tora, Tora". For that matter, the bombing of Tokyo, tacked on at the end with reckless calculation, since it had nothing to do with the basic story, was not done in formation as the movie shows it. The B-25s took off early and headed straight for their targets one by one, not having enough fuel to form up. They launched early because they were sighted by some Japanese fishing vessels and it was justifiably assumed that the fishing vessels had radioed the contact to authorities. The fishing vessels were fired upon and sunk by our cruisers. They were filled with men, women, and children, according to Rod Steiger, who was among the crew of one of the destroyers in the flotilla.
There IS no really good movie about the attack on Pearl Harbor. A far better film of the period is "From Here to Eternity" or, better yet, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." I realize it's hard to believe but "Pearl Harbor" is cornier, less accurate, and more dumbed down than "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," which is a 1944 movie made for adults not kids suffering from attention-deficit disorder.