Sleep-inducing

Rating: 3/10 (28 February 2005)

It seems that this movie is one of the most hated movies ever made (at least reading comments here on IMDb and also listening to people commenting on it elsewhere). But then there's the other crowd who truly enjoyed it and thought it was among the best war epics ever. Myself, i must say that i have seldom seen a movie that felt so much like an endurance test. I was chewing on my seat just to have something to do while sitting in the theater.
The problems with this movie are numerous and of catastrophic proportions. While a lot could be said about the atrocious acting and overly pompous style of the movie, that is not the main flaw. Rather the script is the main offender. Seeing that writer Randall Wallace has also written such epic manure as "We were soldiers" and "The man in the iron mask" comes as no real surprise. The scriptwriting here is terrible, and it's completely insane that the demands for the script were not higher on a movie budgeted at over 135 million dollars. Basically this is a script and story worthy of a porn movie. It's one hour build-up, one hour massacre and one hour slowdown in the end. Unbearably boring is the key-word for all three sequences.
Because the main problem with this movie is not the keen patriotism, the laughable "acting" from Ben Affleck or the sappy love themes. No it's the combination of all these. It's not awful like "We were soldiers", nor is it crap in a "bad but entertaining" way. Rather it's just an insufferable bore. The only part of the movie where i was not half-unconscious was during the actual attack on Pearl Harbor. In that sequence one could easily see where the 135 million dollars went...
Maybe it's just me. But still i personally feel that demands should be a little higher on a movie that cost as much as this one. The least i should be able to demand is that i don't fall asleep in my chair! I rate this 3/10 with an extra point added because it can be used as a substitute for Valium.