Excellent, apart from green painted Mitsubishi Zeroes

Rating: Null/10 (3 July 2001)

I wish war movies like this had been around when I had been a kid. They'd have shown me that war is a terrible terrible thing and not some corking big adventure as these sick comics of the 1970s seemed to make out. This film is better than Tora!Tora!Tora! and From Here To Eternity (and the beach scenes in Pearl Harbor bring the latter film to mind). It has a good story and it portrays war for the horror it is. If we are going to make films about war they should be anti-war films. Tora!Tora!Tora! did not concentrate enough on the terrible loss of life at Pearl Harbor and the attack in that film is just a lot of exploding ships. This film shows that people died terrible deaths or were horribly injured. There is one scene where two guys are painting the side of a ship. A torpedo slams into the side of the ship and they are just obliterated in the explosion. That and other scenes hit home very hard. The scenes showing the Curtiss P-40s being destroyed on the tarmac are horrific as is the scene during the Battle of Britain section of the story where the nose is completely shot off a Heinkel 111. The battle scenes aim at horror and don't glorify destruction unlike the war films of the 60s and 70s. They had genuine Mitsubishi A6M Zeros in this film and didn't use the replicas converted from North American Harvards which were used in Tora!Tora!Tora! (although the Aichi D3A2 Vals and the Nakajima B5N2 Kates were the same Harvard and Vultee BT-13 based replicas which were used in Tora) but why did they have to paint them green? Zeroes were not painted green until later in the war. The ones that took part in the attack were painted light gray and they were that colour in Tora!Tora!Tora! The biplane seen at the start of the film is a Boeing Stearman. This part of the film is set in 1923 and the Boeing Stearman did not appear until the late 1930s although I appreciate that hiring a plane that would have been more appropriate for that period like a Curtiss Jenny would only have added to the cost of an already expensive film. Alec Baldwin does well as Jimmy Doolittle and it's hard to credit that the actor playing Admiral Yamamoto is the same actor as played the eskimo in The Island at the Top of the World. Kate Beckinsale does very well and should get the Bob Hoskins award (joke) for most convincing American accent by a British actor or actress. Jon Voight gives the best and most convincing portrayal of FDR that I have seen. An excellent film which deserves to do better than it has so far. It deserves to do as well as Titanic, to which it has been compared. Let's face it, there are similarities. A love story set against a 20th century event and a leading lady called Kate!