Not the subject matter for this type of movie

Rating: 2/10 (28 May 2001)

Lets forget for a second, which is very easy to do in this movie, that the name of the film is Pearl Harbor. Let us forget for a moment that the horror of he attack scenes, something done very well, does not depict the reality of what happened. In other words, let us just look at this film for a moment as if it were a fantastical story created out of the minds of the people who worked on it. In that context this movie is not horrible.
Saving Graces- What this movie truly has to draw on are a few things. First and foremost the special effects which are just dazzling. The team of Bay and Bruck did a wonderful job of creating reality on the screen and doing, if only for a moment, what every great WAR movie does and that is bring the action and the horror right to you. Secondly, the score and cinematography, which never gets a lot of attention since no one goes to the movies for that, is magnificant. It looks like old America, smells like old America, and at least sounds like an epic even if it doesn't exactly live up to that. Thirdly, Ben Affleck leads the list of a few wonderful acting jobs done on this film. Affleck, for the first time, looks like the leading man he is so often proclaimed as. At no time during his on screen perfromance did I beginning looking for Matt Damon or Bruce Willis to come and save him from being the focal point of the scene. He was everything a leading man must be, sensitive enough to appeal to the women and "kick-a%*" enough for the men. John Voight as a perfect FDR and Dan Akroyd as a fictional Japanese decoder are wonderful in the movie and everytime they go off screen you are hoping it won't be too long until they are back on.
Not worth the money- Where this movie falls short, however, is in expressing a story, other than the invasion, that people actually care about. The love triangle is absurd and so uninvolving by the end no on cares who ends up with who. Kate Beckinsale, keep calling her Blanchett wich she most definetely not, plays the love torn nurse who, through a turn of events I will not reveal, falls in love with two childhood friends Rafe (Afflek) and Danny (Hartnett). Beckinsale is aweful and fails to show even the slightest bit of creative maturity when forced into scenes calling for her to be distraught. Hartnett, as opposed to Affleck, is a bore everytime he is on the screen and plays his part with about as much emotion as Al Gore on Valium. Though neither actor are given the break of having good lines, I still cannot get over the fact that the same man who wrote Braveheart penned this nightmare of a script, still neither showed the ability to carry even the most rudimentary emotions over the screen. In the most dramatic parts of the movie both of these characters react as if their nephews roomates cousins grilriends dog died of old age at 22 years old. There is no emotion, and the worst is Beckinsale who many times is caught dried eyed as she convulses from uncontrollable anguish. Not only is the acting horrible, the love story absurd, but it becomes an even greater blow to the movie when you realize that 80%, and I do mean 80% or more of this 31/2 movie is devoted to that same love story. It is absolutely amazing that SOOO much time could be spent on this story and by the end the characters remained severely underdeveloped and the audience apathetic to their eventual outcome.
The real shame of this movie, and I didn't even touch on the end part which is actually too badly done to even be funny, is the fact that this movie not only could have been but SHOULD have been so much better. This wasn't named "Hawaiian Love" but it was named Pearl Harbor. Real men, real heroes, real people lived and died on that faithful day and because of that this movie is an insult. My grandfather was stationed in Pearl Harbor in 1941 and was lucky enough, three days before the attack, to put to sea. He returned two days after the attack, helped rebuild a fleet and bury men, and sometimes, on nights when maybe he had had a few to many beers, spoke of the tapping he had heard from the men trapped within the Arizona. This was not a movie that should or could have afforded misrepresentations of the truth, silly "two pilots vs. twenty, no problem" battle scenes, and most importantly, the idea that the amazing events of not only that day but the months that preceded it were not enough of a story to draw on. Having heard the tension and sorrow in my grandfathers voice as he told the stories of the friends he lost that day it is hard for me to care whether or not 12-14 year old girls need to see Josh Harnett without a shirt on to max out the dollars. This was a movie that SHOULD have focused on Pearl Harbor instead of treating it as an afterthought. Could you have included everyday reality of the people who lived the Pear Harbor experience, maybe even a less contrived love story? Most certainly, but only as a sattelite to the main story. In the end what this did was bring to the cinemas a $150 million extravaganza, with wonderful effects and huge explosions, that does not even attempt to honor the men who died there. How embarrassing.