Three hours filled with ...nothing

Rating: 1/10 (18 June 2001)

As a European I saw Pearl Harbor, and after three of the most boring movie hours of my life I wondered if in Hollywood they realize that also non-Americans go to the cinema.
This is another Patriotic load of crap. It has got an uninteresting love triangle, bad acting and some (ok) nice special effects.
This was going to be the Blockbuster of the year??? Those crazy Americans. Do they really believe that the audience would love this crap? I heard that Disney expected it to beat Titanic. They are so arrogant over there. How long did it last as the no.1 movie? ...A week? and rightfully so.
As an audience you do not feel compelled with any of the characters. In fact you don't care if they live or die. And (in opposite of Titanic) you certainly don't want to see it once again. It's much too long and boring to go through it once more.
In an effort to make a new Titanic they forgot that the strength of that movie was the emotional binding with the characters together with the great visual spectacle. That same thing made Gladiator a big hit (or did you think that it was the sight of the digitally built arena that did it for this movie?). No, this one (Pearl Harbor)just has some great effects and that's it.
But maybe that the Americans think differently about it. They are in fact very patriotic (when I saw "the Shadow" in the states in '94, there is a line in that movie where Baldwin as the Shadow says to his opponent something like: "Hey watch it, that's the US of A your talking about" Every proud American soul in the theater started to clap their hands and cheer, I think that says enough) but then again, maybe it's even too much for them to handle.
However as a European I could not appreciate this long movie. Bad acting and no story made it give me a 1 out of 10. Sorry but in my eyes it didn't deserve any more.