I tried, honest...

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2002)

I tried, oh god, I tried.
Actually, both my friend and I tried. We'd mentally prepared ourselves in advance, with tried and true extras, because we knew this was going to suck, and badly  hell, the advance comments from the good citizens of the US of A (including this site - thanks, people) had given us enough warning  but nothing, nothing had truly readied us for this onslaught...
nothing, be it opiate (legal or otherwise) or perhaps the effect of slamming one's head against the wall repeatedly until the spilt blood obscures one's vision, can truly prepare, lull, deaden, or drug you enough to the required point of idiocy needed to endure this wretchedly sad, deathly dull, overly grandiose, expensively cheapened and obscenely stupid defiling of history.
I'm sorry, but words fail me. There are only so many permutations of words once can bring to this cinematically wasted three hours to describe a single word: the word being, quite simply, "STUPID". (Note the capitals.)
Put it this way: I felt dirty. I felt embarrassed that people, complete strangers all of them, saw me exit the theatre. I felt ashamed that I'd had a friend come with me, even for moral support, who could then prove I had seen it. And he felt ashamed he'd agreed to come along.
So I'll concentrate on the good bits, and cut this rant short. And the good bits are:
· The CGI may be a bit deadening, but it does break the monotony.
· It redefines history probably further than the producers intended, in that clearly the Japanese had never harboured any of the ill-feeling or expansionist policies that historians claim would eventually bring it into direct conflict to the United States.
(Seriously. Think about it: this film clearly shows that the strike was obviously purely directed at a couple of US pilots (well, two in particular) and a handful of nurses (OK, one in particular) in a vain attempt to end the insanity of a completely unnecessarily contrived and over-long love triangle between three self-obsessed morons whose self obsession threatened to rupture any form of conceivable and viable continuity in American intelligence. After all, the Luftwaffe had already tried and failed to take out Affleck's character, in the comically nonsensical Battle Of Britain bit. That other people were injured (2,403 dead, 188 destroyed planes and a crippled Pacific Fleet) in what would be eventually be described as the event that brought the United States into the Second World War can, in view of the revisionism on offer here, be described as unfortunate collateral damage. The Japanese shame for the tragic events of December 7 can therefore only be that they simply and unforgivably failed to execute their targets properly, and compounded their error by mistakenly shooting up a fair amount of American property and unrelated people. It was, in effect, a badly executed drive-by.) · The SFX planes are pretty cool and realistic looking.
· Somehow the Japanese don't look so bad. You end up cheering them on: "They're in the hangar! The hangar! To your left! Strafe the hangar!"
· Oh yeah, and there's that pretty fabulous bomb's-eye-view shot.
· The DVD set has lots of extras. (Actually, that may not be a good thing.)
But look. Please. Don't take my word, or the others on this site. Go and see this film. Do NOT listen or read any more about this film. Just go and see it. All of it.
Hell, I lost three hours of my life that I'll never reclaim, so why don't you?