Save the time, save the money. Rent the DVD for the battle.

Rating: 4/10 (26 May 2001)

Three hours. Sure seemed like five.
This movie had some very impressive ads. You saw children camping on hillsides and playing baseball as japanese planes flew by. You looked at the huge theater lobby posters of those same shots and thought, 'Damn that's an evocative shot. There's got to be a great story behind those images.' Nope. Not a chance. That would require depth and plot development. This move sells itself as another Saving Private Ryan, would actually prefer to be another Titanic, and actually delivers schlocky soap opera fluff.
The best part of the evening was the fun we had playing, 'Guess the movie they wanted to rip off', with every scene in the film. As has been mentioned constantly, the movie would really love to be Titanic ("for the chicks"), with some vague attempts at a PG-13 de-gored Pvt. Ryan ("to pull the guys in"). Everything from 'From Here to Eternity', to just about every WWII genre pic you'd care to name, to Bay's own 'Armageddon' are in heavy visual rotation.
I particularly enjoyed the completely pace-killing editing they did during some of the first actually well-done FX footage: Well executed fx shots of Afleck's spitfire dog fighting with german aircraft. BOOM! Spectacular explosion of a german aircraft... STOP! Now lets take a lovely pensive look at Kate Beckinsale wandering around aimlessly, and completely irrelevently, back in the states. NOW BACK TO THE ACTION!
Lather rinse repeat. They did this throughout the film. Talk about frustrating!
The first 45mins to an hour were pretty much a waste of time to anyone that had come to see the movie in the previews. The events from Dec. 7th, though factually 'out there' at least were pretty well executed. But the remainder of the film, involving a particularly bad fictionalized 30min compressed version of Doolittle's raid on Japan (involving our intrepid fighter jocks as Mitchell Bomber pilot's no less - It's unfortunate that the scenes of Aflleck and Hartnett flying the Enola Gay over Hiroshima had to be cut for time.:P), was really an after-thought at best.
There were at least three potentially good films trapped in this bloated whale: A love story about a spunky fighter pilot who abandon's his true love to run off to fight with the Brits before the war; The story of the world-changing events surrounding Dec. 7th; and the story of Doolittle's raid. Any one of which could have been a good film (and generally have been in the past, see '30 Seconds Over Tokyo' for example). Instead we get one bloated, completely misadvertised piece of fluff. Heck I probably wouldn't have minded two of the three overstuffed plots above, if they'd been even mentioned in the previews.
Save your time, save your money. Rent the DVD and skip to the battle sequences.