An embarrassing so called historical epic!!!!

Rating: 4/10 (29 May 2001)

When I first saw the trailer Of Pearl Harbor last year and saw that the team of Bay/Brukheimerwere behind the film I was a little apprehensive, the trailer was great it showed what would hopefully be an old fashioned war epic, but a movie that would do justice to the historical event that it was depicting.these guys are better at making mindless but really entertaining action movies like Armageddon, and The Rock. Those movies could get by on being just entertainments, this movie had to be something more. My fears came true, Pearl Harbor is nothing more than a chance for Michael Bay to blow things up! The movie has no heart, the characters are so shallow that you feel nothing for them. True the attack on pearl harbor is impressive technically, but it has been directed and edited as an action sequence not a terrifying surprise attack. The tone of the sequence is all wrong. Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, and Josh Hartnett are given nothing to do except look pretty for the camera. The love triangle between the characters is one of the blandest, most uninvolving love stories that I have ever seen. They say there lines as if they were reading them of cue cards. The screenplay is embarrassingly bad, even by summer movie standards. The movie wants to be very patriotic, Jon Voight as FDR does what he can to add honor to the film, but it rings hollow.
This movie is a more than obvious attempt to repeat the Titanic formula. That film is far superior to this one. It was a grand Hollywood spectacle, but the screenplay at least created two characters that the audience could care about. Pearl Harbor didn't have to be Saving Private Ryan, but it makes no real attempt to be a historical account, forget accuracy, most films of this kind take dramatic license, but this film doesn't even try to offer any insight or perspective on what occurred. So the movie outright fails as a love story and historical drama. What is left if 35 minutes of well produced action. Too bad that the filmmakers paid so little attention to rest of their story. This movie will make a lot of money, but it will be remembered more for what it should have been, not what it is.
Grade: D