I saw it once...and will probably never see it again

Rating: 6/10 (26 July 2004)

**Warning: Spoilers**
When I saw the first trailer for Pearl Harbor back in late 2000, I thought that it looked damn cool, and it would be one of the movies that I planned to see in the summer of 2001. But, for some reason (I forget exactly why), I never saw it when it was out in theatres. I also never bothered to rent it when it came out on Video/DVD. I guess this is due in part to many of my friends saying it was a bad movie, although a few did say they liked it. I swore that one of these days I would see Pearl Harbor, and decide for myself whether it deserved all of its negative/positive reviews. Now, three years after it was released I caught it on cable TV while flipping through the channels. And what did I think of it? Pearl Harbor sacrifices strong character development for special effects, and becomes a movie that is at best average.
Let me start off by talking about the high points of the movie, the battle scenes. The computer animated fighter planes were well done, and seeing waves of Japanese Zero fighters flying over Pearl Harbor was just plain cool. The attack on Pearl Harbor, as depicted by the movie, is chock full of explosions, guns ablazing, and well-choreographed dogfights. It's the only sequence in the movie that held my attention for any length of time, but I would expect no less from a director like Michael Bay. His resume of movies makes him well suited to vividly rendering tremendous scenes of carnage. Yet, at the same time as I thought how cool the special effects were, I realized that this was a weakness too.
The battle scenes in this movie, specifically the Pearl Harbor attack, are not something that should make us say "Yo! That's so cool how the Arizona blew up!" These battle scenes should make us focus on how horrible the attack was, and it hindsight, the attack on Pearl Harbor in this movie looked more like a scene from Independence Day, but replaces the alien and jet fighters with World War II era craft. The American planes unrealistically fly only a few feet above the ground, while strafing the Japanese fighters. I couldn't help but feel that this was dishonoring the memory of those who died in the attack.
The characters seemed more like a second thought in this movie, taking a back seat to the battle scenes. The dialogue was often very corny, and the acting itself was pretty stilted on the whole. I've lost count as to how many times Capt. Rafe McCawley (played by Ben Affleck) tells Nurse Evelyn Johnson (played by Kate Beckinsale) she's so beautiful. One would think she would get the point after the first five times. Their romance (and her eventual romance to Josh Harnett's character) looks too forced, as if they are supposed to fall in love simply to advance the plot and nothing else. This movie also, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, attempts to sledgehammer the point that you are supposed to feel sorry for all the soldiers and civilians. They show tons of scenes of giggling young women, happy-go-lucky men having a beer, and several cheap love scenes. What I don't think director Michael Bay realizes is that since we know about the tragedy to come, there is no need to take such a heavy-handed and redundant approach. Bay appears to think otherwise, and has to constantly reinforce the idea that "you must feel sorry for these people."
Lastly, there are a couple scenes in Pearl Harbor that I have to talk about. The first is the scene during the attack when Capt. Danny Walker (Josh Harnett's character) radios that "I think World War II just started." When he said that my eyebrows were drawn together, and my hands clenched into a fist. World War II did not start at Pearl Harbor! Countries like Britain, France, and Canada were fighting the Nazis, and the Chinese were fighting the Japanese before Pearl Harbor happened.
The second scene would be during the Jimmy Doolittle raid on a Japanese industrial area. One thing that I (and other critics) noticed was that there were very few Japanese civilians that could be seen in the area. And once the bombs dropped, we saw buildings being blown up, but no screaming Japanese civilians. This is probably because the filmmakers did not want to put too much of a damper on the movie, by making the audience realize that Americans bombed civilians too.
I will admit that I did feel a LITTLE sadness when everybody thought Affleck's character died in Europe, and when Harnett's character died at the end. Other than that, Pearl Harbor the movie is entirely forgettable. My recommendation is that if you want to see a war movie with great drama (and no cheesy love story), coupled with great action scenes, go see Saving Private Ryan (1998). If you want to see a more historically accurate depiction of the Pearl Harbor attack that has little cheesy dialogue, and shows what happened on both sides, go see Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Tora! Tora! Tora! has special effects that still hold up even today despite its age, and in my opinion, is a much better film than this 21st century Pearl Harbor movie.
I give Pearl Harbor movie a 6 out of 10.