Horrible movie worth seeing.

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2001)

I would recommend this movie to anyone. I think this movie is worth the price of admission. However, I would warn anyone who is about to see this movie that this is a bad movie. There is no question about it. This movie is contrived, bereft of inspiration and originality, laughably cliché, mawkish, under edited, and worst of all it is a testament to bad dialogue.
You never for a moment believe the love story involving Rafe and Evelyn. Rafe (Ben Affleck) seems to fall in love with Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) because she is beautiful. Evelyn seems to fall in love with Rafe because he is pathetically persistent and has a cute butt. There is no intelligent and substantial foundation for a romance. Instead of writing in the substance needed for a romance the movie tries to induce romance using dramatic music, slow motion, all sorts of romantic clichés. The effect is that the love story becomes nauseatingly mawkish. You don't believe me? In one scene Evelyn tells Rafe, `I will never be able to look at another sunset without thinking of you.'
The second love story between Evelyn and Danny (Josh Hartnett) was a lot better yet it got a lot less time. The reasons they have for falling in love are a little more complicated and interesting. Strangely the best love story, the only one that moved me was the one involving Betty (James King) and a stuttering sailor. That got the least time.
The dialogue is phenomenally bad. Throughout the movie I kept wondering how a professional writer could possibly produce such unnatural, cliché-ridden dialogue. I suspect someone held a gun to Randall Wallace's head as he wrote the screenplay. Let me give you an example of a cliché. There is a scene in the movie where Evelyn runs to the train station at the last minute to find that Rafe is already on a train about to leave. The old lovers at the train station scene! Can you believe it? I couldn't. I started laughing. There were at least five points in the movie where the dialogue was so stunningly appalling it actually made me laugh out loud. Lawyers can be disbarred, doctors can lose their licenses, can't screenwriters be thrown out of the screenwriters guild? I am not exaggerating the dialogue in the screenplay is that bad.
By now you are probably wondering why I would recommend a movie that has what I claim is probably one of the worst screenplays ever. I recommend this movie because the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is that good. You have to see it in a theater, just like you have to see the ship sink in `Titanic', or the battle scenes in `Saving Private Ryan.' The scenes allow you to see things so horrifying that you could never have imagined them. Before this movie I had read about the bombing of Pearl Harbor but I had never felt anything. ILM's brilliant work allowed me to experience what it's like to see people incinerated by bombs, to see sailors clinging to a sinking battleship, to see people being cut to pieces by strafing fighter planes. Now Pearl Harbor feels tragic to me and I have a new respect for the people who suffered through that atrocity.
I recommend that anyone interested in this movie simply arrive about an hour late, just in time to see the bombing. After the bombing scene you should just run out of the theater as though it were being attacked by Japanese fighter planes.