Truly terrible

Rating: 1/10 (12 January 2008)

I watched this again for a second time on television, thinking it could not possibly be as bad as I remembered, but it was actually worse.
This movie suffers from any number of flaws Most obvious is an overly long script due to the seeming insistence that this movie must end on an American victory through the Doolittle raid, not the actual devastation of Pearl Harbor. In addition, we have to have the useless, distracting story of Cuba Gooding Jr. as Dory Miller, which might have worked if the movie didn't seem to also need to cover the RAF, an unbelievably sappy love story, a fiancée torn away from her love, some other unimportant but present nurses and airmen, and everything else jammed into this film. It was three movies jammed into one, and none of them were done well except for the special effects from the actual attack on Pearl Harbor.
The dialogue and script are also truly horrible. Alec Baldwin's character has the lion's share of ridiculously cheesy, undeliverable lines that he hams up like his character on 30 Rock, which doesn't work for this film. I don't know if Doolittle ever actually said some of that stuff, but Baldwin's delivery made me giggle. Rafe and Danny also have some doozies. This movie must contain every sappy love story line ever written, every cheesy motivational speech ever delivered.
There are also just too many characters to care about in this film. Betty, Red, Jennifer Garner's character, Dory Miller, etc, their pain and everything else about them gets lost in the overwhelming quantity of people we are introduced to. Even Danny and Rafe aren't really developed characters, and apparently we're supposed to believe that Kate Beckinsdale's character sprang up from the Earth just as the war was starting as we know nothing about her.
Whoever made the remark about the score being overpowering is exactly right. The music is overwhelming and drowns out any emotional power of the scenes. I'm not sure if Hans Zimmer was trying to overpower the bad dialogue, but the main theme gears up almost every two minutes and just becomes annoying.
The battle scene is rather impressive, but it's seemingly lost in a morass of bad movie rather than the climax of the film, which is a testament to just how bad the surrounding film is.
Overall, a terrible movie that should have confined itself to one incident and a few, realistic people instead of creating a gigantic mess.