Pretty much a guilty pleasure

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 2002)

6 out of 10
Pearl Harbor thinks its a glorious masterpiece that meditates the meaning of love, brotherhood, and the loss of innocence. Sorry, Mr. Bruckheimer, deep this movie isn't. What he and director Michael Bay have done, however, is craft an extremely entertaining action/romance which at least does partial justice to those who died in the Pearl Harbor attack.

Yes, my enjoyment of this film is of the guilty variety. The writing is full of cliches, overblown speeches, and one-note stereotypes with a mediocre love story at the center of it all. But the performances are all charismatic and surprisingly fitting for a movie set in this time period and the battle scenes are spectacular and visually stunning. Pearl Harbor obviously wants to be Saving Private Ryan meets Titanic, and it's definitely second rate on both attempts, but being second rate to those films at least means it makes a decent timewaster.