More than just bad

Rating: Null/10 (29 December 2001)

I actually have another comment floating around here, condemning the movie as extremely lazy on the part of all involved. But the movie is worse than that. Like Grease, no one seems to acknowledge how amoral the movie is(the glorified harassment of Eugene). I have heard defense of the movie as a summer entertainment film, not supposed to be taken seriously. Well, the deaths of hundreds of people is something to be taken seriously. This isn't like Independence Day, where none of it actually happened. People actually died. The movie is barely about Pearl Harbor, it's about acouple of people who weren't even terribly affected. Not to mention the rampant use of ethnic slurs being depicted as heroic(interesting also how black people are respected completely in the '40s). I recognize that that's how it happened, but don't make it look okay. I think we all learned after Saving Private Ryan that war is an awful ugly thing that ruins lives, and not fun thing to make simple enjoyable movies about. If you want a good war movie, watch The Bridge on the River Kwai, where war is simply two forces fighting eachother futily. Not this, where heroes blow away cardboard villains.