Makes Titanic Look Like A Movie

Rating: 1/10 (13 February 2003)

James Cameron must be thanking his lucky stars for Michael Bay, because a manipulative old clunker like 'Titanic' should've gone down irretrievably beneath the waves of movie history, never to rate another mention again. But then along comes Bay, and 'Pearl Harbor', and realisation dawns that Cameron is everything that Bay is not, viz: a director capable of managing a decent job no matter how dire the material.
And dire 'Pearl Harbor' most certainly is, the screenplay scissored from out-takes of 1940s movies that, unlike this farrago of film-making, at least had the decency to come in on budgets of under fifty dollars. Bay's, by contrast, mops up sufficient funds to repay much of the Third World's debt, though to no other purpose except the dishonouring of the memory of what actually occurred whilst insulting the audience's intelligence in the process.
Some, of course, may view it as fine entertainment, as does Bay and his writer. A pity, then, that the thought has never occurred to any of them that of all the explosions in this staggeringly inept setpiece, the biggest bomb of all is the movie itself.
As other IMDb reviewers have pointed out, Richard Fleischer did it all so much, much better with Tora! Tora! Tora!
Rating: 0 out of 10.