Focuses on boring subplot rather than history

Rating: 3/10 (25 March 2006)

"Pearl Harbor" employs a feeble and woeful attempt to duplicate the success formula of "Titanic," relating a historic event through a fictional love story. It doesn't work this time.
Instead of showing the events leading up to and including the "Day of Infamy," we are instead burdened with a tedious, dry, contrived, and totally irrelevant love triangle plot device. This painful and insulting attempt to cash in on the Rose & Jack story from "Titanic" is a poor focus for the film, and fails for the following three reasons (there are more, but it would make this review too long).
To begin with, the PH triangle characters do not serve as a link to the tragedy they witnessed, as Rose did. Her eyewitness account of the calamity provides an empathic link to the people who perished that horrible night in 1912. She makes them human and real, people we can care about. The three in PH provide no such connection nor insight, whatsoever. They appear to exist for nothing else than window dressing and schmaltz.
Second, the obvious absence of any chemistry between them is at times tediously boring, at other times excruciatingly irritating. The dialog is trite and utterly beyond belief. Never does it touch you emotionally in the slightest.
Finally, the story of the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941 is best told as a documentary, because of the great amount of historic information it encompasses. Approaching it as a romantic drama focuses on the fictional story, rather than the actual history. It becomes a device to tweak tears and exploit them for box office dollar signs, rather than to give dignity to those that lost their lives that fateful day.
The depiction of the actual attack itself was the one sequence deserving a complement in this movie. Perhaps it works because it was the only time the actual event was addressed. Special effects, stunts, action, and story were well coordinated and utilized to precision. Scenes of futile escape/rescue attempts are eloquent, even frightening.
But then they boomerang right back to that pointless triangle, which either has you sleeping or yelling at the screen by this time. Tacked on to the story is an American retaliatory air-raid (which occurred much later), included for reasons only the writer and director know.
A much better movie depicting the attack on Pearl Harbor is the docu-drama "Tora! Tora! Tora!" It clearly and concisely portrays the events leading up to and including the attack, told from the perspective of many witnesses, both American and Japanese. If you're interested in this event, rent that movie. Ignore the movie that offensively represents itself as "Pearl Harbor."