Too slick and beautiful for its own good.

Rating: 3/10 (9 October 2003)

"Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer do Pearl Harbor their way. Their story follows the lives of a few people, Titanic style, leading up to the main event. Like Titanic, this has visually and technically impressive production values, but unlike Titanic this is not all that great of a movie otherwise. While there is nothing wrong with any of the acting, the story, or most anything else tangible, there is something amiss in Bay's directing style. He is simply too slick for his own good, and while that is fine for something like The Rock, here it does not feel right at all. Everything is shiny and sumptuously lit, and everything feels too perfect, too Americana, like Norman Rockwell had painted it. The story is still plenty potent and there are great moments, but history would have been better served by a Saving Private Ryan approach than this sometime action-adventure romp.