That was terrible.

Rating: 2/10 (26 August 2006)

A few years ago, I sat down and watched the first half of the movie, today I watched the second half and sadly it's still really bad. With the exception of the bombing of Pearl Harbor itself, this movie is hardly exciting or interesting. A few years before this movie came out, Michael Bay had just assaulted the American people with Armageddon which had insulted anyone with any scientific knowledge at all. Then came Pearl Harbor which insulted everyone who knows anything about US History at all.
I won't get in to the fact that Roosevelt had browbeat the Japanese into striking first, or that the government knew the Pearl Harbor attacks were coming, or the fact that the Doolittle raid was a propaganda move, or the fact that fighter pilots would never become bomber pilots or you get the idea. Everything this movie knew about history it learned in Kindergarten. The writer/director were too afraid to do anything remotely challenging, write a decent screenplay, end with the battle of Pearl Harbor (Oh gee, did we win WW2?) and decided to throw in an American victory to make it more pleasant for the average American movie goer.
Thankfully this movie was a dud and no more long, boring war/romance movies have been made. United 93 and World Trade Center have proved that Hollywood can make good movies about tragic events. If they cut this movie down just to the bombing and a few tense hours leading up to the bombing, it had the potential to be exciting. Instead, Bay threw in a herd of uninteresting and clichéd characters, nearly an hour of build up, an idiotic last hour where they just had to show the Americans win, and finally where one of the heroes die and his offspring gets to ride a plane a few years later (I'm sure that said offspring likely died in Vietnam anyways...)
What next? Is Bay/Bruckheimer gonna make a movie where they show the Gulf of Tonkin (which is a big of a lie as Pearl Harbor) and then show the Americans winning the war in Vietnam?