Pearl Harbor sinks more than the Arizona

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2001)

I have just come home from the screening of Pearl Harbor here in good old Buffalo, New York, and I'm hungry for a real movie. What a boring mishmash, a stupefying rehash of everything Bruckheimer and Bay (B & B) have done before. There's even a shot where the pilots strut out of the hangar in the EXACT SAME goofy formation that the oil rigger astronauts used in Armageddon. The 45-minute bombing of Pearl Harbor is slick, but empty. It's video game, digital whoop-di-do time. The main problem is that the screenplay never really develops any characters, so you don't really care about anyone. The deaths at Pearl Harbor are cold and distant. B & B make the mistake of thinking we'd really care about a TV commercial-style action flick with a silly, and I mean SILLY love story around which to hang the well-known plot. Hey Ben Affleck, your 15 minutes are up. Couldn't you have tried to have read ONE line with feeling? Josh Hartnett is the better of the leads, and that's not saying much because the script is so empty-headed. Kate Beckinsale keeps losing her American accent. All the nurses are photographed as if they've stepped out of a retro-ad for hair care products. And why on earth did B & B decide to shoot the chaotic hospital scenes during the bombing as if we were watching 3-D without the glasses. What's with that? Or maybe the footage was damaged and B & B decided to pretend to be arty and figured that all that out-of-focus stuff and humans with light rings around them (halos?) would seem miraculous or mystical. Overall, on a scale of 1 - 10, Pearl Harbor earns a 4. On a scale of 4 Stars, it earns 2. On a letter scale of A+ to F-, it earns a C-. A great movie could have been made about Pearl Harbor and its strategic importance to America, it's history, why our bases were there, its native people and what they thought about white bread Yanks. But no, B & B wanted to have bombs away fun. Well, maybe this film's no total bomb, but its long and boring and at times the love story is laughable. The movie keeps repeating moments, as if, B & B and their screenwriter, Randall Wallace truly had no ideas in their bag of FX tricks. This movie is less about Pearl Harbor and more about B & B's egos. I'm gonna go watch Tora Tora Tora and From Here To Eternity.