This is just about what I expected.

Rating: 6/10 (17 July 2001)

Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay are back from Armageddon fame to once again present to us another tremendous disaster story interspersed with some elaborate and manipulative romance. The film mainly follows the lives of two life long friends, Rafe and Danny, as they grow up obviously meant to be fighter pilots, and the struggles with their friendship brought on by World War II. At least half of the film is made up of this drawn out love story, while the other half covers the Japanese invasion and bombing of Pearl Harbor. This is the reason the movie is so damn long, too. If they had left out this dumbass romance, or at least not drawn it out so much, we would have had a war movie of normal length that would have been much better. The editing between the love story and the actual war coverage is surprisingly awkward and abrupt, initially leaving us with the feeling that we are watching two completely separate movies that were edited together.

The actual bombing of Pearl Harbor is spectacularly done, I have to admit that. The Japanese were obviously made to look much more evil than they were, because this is told from the American point of view, but the special effects and the torpedoes and the entire battle scene at Pearl Harbor was amazing. Cuba Gooding Jr. has a tiny tiny role as the black man who is not allowed to do anything more than cook during his entire time in the Navy, and who ultimately is able to man a gun during the battle and make a difference. This is a noticeable digression in the same vein as the over-simplified African American presence seen in Mel Gibson's The Patriot. It makes you think that Pearl Harbor was made by a bunch of rich white guys who, at the last minute, decided that they better put a black guy in the movie so they wouldn't get in trouble with the NAACP. Nonetheless, Cuba pulled off his overly small role very well, despite the fact that he was only given enough screen time to shoot down one Japanese plane, and that plane almost flew right into him as it crashed.
As with any Bruckheimer film, especially The Rock or Armageddon, with which he also collaborated with director Michael Bay, the entire humanistic portion of the film was shallow and predictable. We get three main cardboard characters, Rafe, Danny, and Evelyn, and a relationship between the three that is entirely predictable. Nonetheless, some people may pretend not to know that, so here is the obligatory warning Â– SPOILERS AHEAD. Rafe supposedly gets killed in combat (he would never have survived a crash-landing into the water like that, but this is Bruckheimer, so we know he didn't really die), and of course, Danny moves in on his girl. Did anyone really think that Ben Affleck would be killed that early in the film? So Danny goes for Evelyn with the ridiculous support of all of Rafe's friends (this is another thing that would never have happened in real life), and then when everything seems to be going okay, Rafe comes back and everything gets mixed up again. Yawn. As the all-seeing audience, we know that Danny had no right to move in on his friend's girlfriend so soon after his theoretical death, so this is the point when we begin to suspect that Danny will be the one to ultimately be killed in combat, and in true Bruckheimer form, it will probably be in a heroic effort to save Rafe's life. And guess what.
There are obvious references to the story structure of Titanic here as well as some scenes that are photographed and composed exactly like some of the battle scenes from Saving Private Ryan, but the film is obviously just trying to cash in on the success of those films. On a quality level, Pearl Harbor and Titanic are about the same, but neither even come close to the tremendous power of a real war film like Saving Private Ryan. I found myself several times thinking of Saving Private Ryan while I was watching Pearl Harbor, and the two movies are so different in their intentions (Saving Private Ryan showed us the war, while Pearl Harbor tried to make us cry by showing how a few people were affected by the war) that it almost seemed like I was watching a cartoon. This is why Pearl Harbor will never be considered a classic war film and will not be considered for an Oscar nod in any category.
Bruckheimer and Bay make movies that are meant to please large audiences by entertaining them without making them think. This is why their movies are such box office hits but also such critical failures. There are always a lot of people who don't see how shallow these films are. For the most part, the action sequences are fast paced and actually pretty good, but they are NEVER realistic, which is probably one of the main reasons that a war film, made by these manipulative Hollywood bigshots, about such a closely scrutinized historical event just didn't come out right. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was obviously the best scene in the film, but was not realistic at all. It was, in fact, about as realistic as a fight scene in a Jet Li movie or a Jackie Chan movie. Fun to watch, but once you walk out of the theater and back into reality, you want to laugh. It's a shame that this scene in Pearl Harbor was padded with two and a half hours of fluff, because it could have been a significant part of a good war film. What a waste.