High Gloss Hollywood Eye Candy For The Brain Dead

Rating: 1/10 (30 July 2005)

At one point during the attack at Pearl Harbor, a character says, "I think World War II just started!"--ignoring the fact that no one used the term at the time. This is rather typical of the movie as a whole: obviously improbable, often flatly impossible, and flogging every cliché to the nth degree.
Although it markets itself as a highly authentic depiction of the events leading up to and the attack on Pearl, PEARL HARBOR is essentially a three hour long and extremely improbable soaper about a love triangle between two friends and a navy nurse. This plot line, which occupies the first third of the film, asks us to believe the proverbial six impossible things before breakfast and predictably reaches a peak just in time for the Japanese attack. The second third of the film shows the attack itself.
Although the attack at Peal Harbor is an exciting bit of film-making, it is really here that the film falls completely apart, asking us to believe that the two male leads not only manage to get their planes off the ground, perform all sorts of acrobatics, blow Japanese Zeros all over the sky, and then land safely to return to the woman they love. As if this is not absurd enough, the film then goes on to send both men off on the Doolittle Raid on Japan itself.
By this point the men have been childhood friends, gone to flight school together, become pilots together, been through Pearl, and are now crash landing in China--and I began to wonder why they were bothering with the nurse; given that their primary interests seemed to be in each other they might as well have dropped their drawers and gotten in bed with each other too. Indeed, such a turn of events would have at least added a touch of curiosity value to this otherwise dreary bit of high-gloss cinematic nonsense.
The DVD contains a History Channel documentary re Pearl Harbor that is very good, a "Making Of" documentary that is disgracefully and distastefully self-congratulatory, and a number of other extras, some of which you will need a computer to access. The picture quality and sound are excellent throughout. Sadly, the movie itself is not.
Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer