Quality effects + decent story line = quality movie, at least this time

Rating: Null/10 (27 May 2001)

I went to see this movie last night, primarily motivated by the hype and because I really wanted to see the graphics and the effects in this movie. I was blown away, the effects are as promised mind-blowing. The story is trite in a way, you can guess what will happen but then again like Titanic, the entire movie is about a historical event that everyone knows the ending of. The three hours don't drag which I would say is due to the skillful weaving of the movie, there are separate plotlines, but they are presented as a coherent single movie, which need each other to survive. The movie managed to bring me into the spirit of the time, I could get a sense of what the Americans would have felt at this point. Seeing the bombing raids, one got a sense of the outrage that would later allow events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to occur. The enemy wasn't portrayed as evil which was good, they were just people doing their jobs, but you were also presented with the American side, which was that they were bombed without provocation. However I didn't get a sense that we ever learned why they were bombing Pearl Harbor aside from some comment about needing oil, just that they were. Other than that a great movie, one I would see again. One word of advice to people going to see it though, try to remember that the movie is a movie, a fictionalized account of real events, this isn't a documentary and so shouldn't be treated as such.