you'd better study the Pearl Harbor tragedy in history books!

Rating: Null/10 (6 December 2003)

Made by the same crew that delivered us "Armageddon" (1998), "Pearl Harbor" is a much less stupid movie than its predecessor and a more ambitious one. You find the actor Ben Affleck in both movies but he's better in "Pearl Harbor" than in "Armageddon" because he manages to avoid third-rate acting.
It isn't sufficient enough to make "Pearl Harbor" one of the finest movies made in 2001 because Michael Bay's movie contains a quite important number of faults. Michael Bay wanted obviously to give to his movie a Hollywood extent and as a consequence it makes the film uninteresting. Moreover this is an unoriginal film because it borrows several sequences or ideas from other movies. For example, as it was the case with "Titanic" (1997), Bay chose to shoot the Pearl Harbor tragedy through the love affair between Kate Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett but this couple can't make the couple DiCaprio-Winslet forget. In short, this device appears colorless.
But the Hollywood side of the movie can be seen at the special effects level. The action sequences are certainly impressive but they are crushed by special effects (when Affleck and Hartnett pilot fighter planes against Japanese pilots, you feel that you are inside a video game!).
From a historical point of view, the movie only suggests an academic vision of the Pearl Harbor tragedy and we learn nothing new.
Nevertheless when the film focuses on the very moving hospital sequences, Michael Bay knows how to create emotion.
At the end, the whole gives a heterogeneous, shaky and conventional movie.