Thirty Seconds over Pearl Harbor and Tokyo

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2003)

To me, "Pearl Harbor" is not a bowdlerization of the kind of WWI romance/action film that "Thirty Seconds over Tokyo" represents but instead is an homage to it. Both films begin in the east and describe their heroes efforts to learn to fly and work as a team in the air while watching their relationships and personalities develop. The stories then move west until reaching the Pacific where the action really begins. The characters in both survived incredible adventures and then emotionally reunite at the end. The situations are credible in both and the acting is fine and strong.
There is a video-game quality to some of the action sequences in "Pearl Harbor" but the human suffering is not ignored or trivialized. (The same could be said for "Titanic", which is also a throwback to an earlier style of film-making that is much missed- I actually through "Pearl Harbor" superior to "Titanic", although I enjoyed both). Complaints that "Pearl Harbor" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" are historically inaccurate in some details or fail to tell the whole story of the war are pointless. All films sacrifice historical accuracy for story-telling to some extent and no film could tell the entire story of WWII. "The Guns of Navarone" is hokum and it doesn't show the concentration camps but was it really necessary for it to do so? Of course not. And isn't it amusing to see one poster describe "Pearl Harbor's" depiction of the Japanese as `racist' and another as `politically correct'.
You can't please all the people all the time but all of these films pleased me.