Better watch something else.....

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2001)

This film would've been good, except for one thing: Jerry Bruckheimer. Bruckheimer Films should've stuck with fiction. It was obvious that they couldn't make a masterful film to describe the events of what happened that day, so they had to include a love story just to try and make it work as an epic. It turns out to be more of a "Titanic" with battleships and zeros than a true historical account. They also would go and greatly compromise historical accuracy for artistic intent, if you want to call a Bruckheimer film artistic. The sequence where Pearl Harbour is attacked is very well done and the special effects are among some of the best and most realistic, but the cliched dialogue, addition of fictional characters, and the inclusion of the insipid love story really brings this movie down. It may be entertaining to its intended core audience, the teenagers and twenty-somethings (although I am 19) that would absolutely adore cardboard cutout romance with the sex scene, but it would be perceived as a terribly mainstream film that fails utterly to be a gripping epic by those who appreciate good cinema. It would, however, no doubt pay for itself in the box office this summer season. But, high grossers are not always great films. It's still worth a watch, but the *real* good Pearl Harbour flick is still "Tora! Tora! Tora!". If you've not seen that film, watch it as it is a greatly accurate historical film pertaining to the subject of the attack on Pearl Harbour, and was produced in cooperation by American and Japanese production companies for 20th Century Fox. As for the best summer film, I think that honor would go to the upcoming "Final Fantasy" picture coming this July. - Reinhart