a waste of money

Rating: 4/10 (3 June 2002)

If you want to see a movie about the attack on Pearl Harbour, then go see "Tora! Tora! Tora!". If you want a stupid action movie pretending to be a war movie then give this one a try.
With that kind of budget it should have been a great movie, to bad that it has proved countless of times that big budget means mediocricy in every aspect other than the audiovisual part. The reason is simple, a REAL war movie will have a much smaller audience and probably have stayed in the reds forever. Therefore they make a mess of a movie that is part romantic drama, part history lesson(not really), part action and above all an ultrapatriotic piece of technological terror. Doing that they have ensured a very large audience(particulary in the US), but the quality is bond to be so-so. This was also done with "Enemy at the Gates", a movie that was far superior to this one but still lacking simply because it tried to hard to get a big audience.
As a war movie it's quite bad. One of the problem with this movie is that it's way to "arcade", particulary the scene where our two heroes decides to play chicken with the japanese Zero fighters. The creators decided to make things look cool instead of making it look realistic. This may work in an actionmovie, but it just look plain silly in a war movie. In effect it has little touch with reality.
I hope that the next time they spend so much money on a war movie they make it a WAR MOVIE(a movie like "Das Boot" or "Talvisota"), not a mess describing how the good old US of A won the war. 4 out of 10.