Fun for the eyes, not for the brain.

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2001)

Well the first of many exciting summer blockbusters has arrived and it delivers on the special effects front, but not much elsewhere.
Pearl Harbor is a story about two friends (can't remember their names in the movie and don't care enough to check) who like to fly planes. One of them gets a great girlfriend but decides to go off and fight the war, after his plane gets shot down everyone assumes he's dead and his friend decides to put the moves on his girlfriend. You can probably guess where the movie goes from here. Oh, I forgot to mention that they all wind up at Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. The story is predictable and hokey but not quite as laughably cheesy as Titanic. Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale all deliver better performances that Leonardo Dicaprio or Kate Winslet, but that's really not saying much.
Anyway, enough about the stupid story. On to the battle scenes! The movie really delivers on this aspect with some of the biggest, most fantastic special effects I've seen to date. It's got huge explosions, wizzing bullets, crashing planes, fast paced dogfights, sinking ships, falling bombs and anything else you can think of. The Pearl Harbor attack scene is the highlight, of course, lasting about 40 minutes or so. However there are a couple other scenes that are quite impressive as well. Don't expect perfect historical accuracy though as this is something of a watered down version of the attack. One thing most veterans claim is the most memorable aspect of the attack is the oil spread all over the water igniting and burning sailors alive. There are no shots of this but there are a few inside the hospital of sailors covered in oil. This is a PG-13 Disney production though so expect the actual blood and gore to be at a minimum.
My biggest problem with Pearl Harbor is the length. They essentially took a love story that could've been packed into less than an hour of footage and extended it over two hours. This can get quite annoying for the first 2/3rds of the film is extremely slow and uninteresting. If they had trimmed even half an hour off it would've made the film much more enjoyable. Oh well, I'll probably buy the DVD so I can skip straight to the good parts.
So if you're looking for a big special effects extravaganza then Pearl Harbor will surely hit home, although you might consider walking in an hour late. If you're looking for a truly excellent movie with lots of depth, I would recommend you steer clear of Pearl Harbor and find a theater playing Memento instead. I'm going to do something I haven't done before which is give Pearl Harbor a couple different ratings. My final rating for the movie as a whole is a 5 out of 10. If they had chopped 20-30 minutes off the useless crap I would've given it a 6. 30-45 minutes would've gotten it a 7. And 45 minutes to an hour would've gotten it an 8. That's my opinion, enjoy.