War is unpleasant, but this film is worse.

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2002)

The historical facts are all wrong, and it ends up as a bad rip off of Titanic, Top gun and Legends of the Fall, and . Tora Tora was by far a better film despite the age.
Only 1 American plane took off and only 1 Japanese plan crashed (due to an engine failure) not the seven that got shot down in one of the top gun scenes of the film.
The film belittles the true storys which it drops in as more of an after thought (like the cooks story) and trys to re-write a lot of the facts in typical Hollywood style for the sake of American pride. What's worse is the bad romantic story (ripped off Legends of the fall it seems) that makes the film take so long to start. The actual pearl harbour section in minimal and the best bits can be seen in the trailer for the film.
It seems they tried to do this Titanic style, only they failed to give most of it any believability. By the time they started dropping the bombs I was hard pushed to feel sympathetic. On top of it all, the changes they made ended up diminishing the impact of the disaster section of the movie.
It'd be nice to see a movie start with Pearl Harbour and end with Hiroshima, and not try and make it "spunky" and cheap. It seems bad war films are popular with hollywood these days for some reason, all changing history and afraid to show the truth. It is rather unfortunate.