One of the worst war movies ever made

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2001)

"Pearl Harbor" is the kind of movie where a man and a woman who have just witnessed countless numbers of people getting shot and blown up can honestly look each other in the eye as they well up, sniffle, and ask in all earnest "But...what about us?" It's the kind of movie where secondary characters die by what seems like the thousands, and getting your girlfriend pregnant or getting engaged is as good as a death warrant. And it's the kind of movie that's so boring you stop caring about anyone in it less than a third of the way through.
Earlier in the year, a movie titled "Enemy at the Gates" was released, set in the battle of Stalingrad where a Soviet peasant becomes a hero by sniping Nazi officers, so in retaliation the Nazis send their own expert sniper to draw him into a showdown and crush the propaganda machine he's made of himself. It featured great standoffs between the two near the beginning and middle, but it soon dissolved into an insipid, uninteresting love triangle between the Soviet sniper, the man who made him famous, and a Russian female freedom fighter. I didn't really care for it, really, but when compared to "Pearl Harbor," "Enemy at the Gates" deserves to be seen as one of the best war movies ever made. The makers of this pile engineered the preview to make it appear as if it was 90% explosions with a love story in there somewhere, but the most uninteresting romances of the past decade take up a good two-thirds of the running time. By the end of the movie, I wasn't sure if the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor to sink ships or if they just wanted to kill people in love.
A lot has been made of the possibility of Japanese Americans being offended at the movie, but beyond ominous, evil sounding music that plays whenever scowling actors portray Japanese naval officers planning the attack, and at least fifty cries of "Yeah! Got those ba****ds!" screamed throughout the movie, there's nothing to be offended about.
*Plot spoilers ahead, although if you didn't see them all while watching the movie about five minutes in advance, I feel sorry for you*

On the love triangle, I've loved movies with romance before, but the way this is done is just sloppy. Affleck makes a pathetic plea to a nurse while getting his immunizations, she falls for him after maybe a minute of resisting, and before you know it they've exchanged lovey-dovey gifts and gone on a date by a ship in port, and they're virtual life partners. None of the slow buildup or obstacles found in real life relationships, they just fly into each others' arms. Affleck volunteers to fight in Europe, gets shot down, and word gets back that he's dead. Three months later, it's taken the nurse about two minutes to fall for his childhood pal, and they're humping like jackrabbits. Gee, ya' think Affleck is going to turn up alive, come back at a very convenient moment, and it'll all lead to a cliche`d barfight seen a thousand times before in a thousand better movies? And that they'll reconcile just in time to leap into the Pearl Harbor battle and become heroes, then chosen for a top secret mission where only one comes back?
Running as a parallel story (and I use the term loosely) is Cuba Gooding Jr.'s blank page of a black navy officer, who adds nothing to the story at all and whose character should've been scrapped. He's given no definition or personality at all, just a suit of skin to wear that the filmmakers threw in so the NAACP wouldn't complain. I can almost hear them saying "OK, that's enough of the black guy to satisfy the minorities, now back to the white people!"
Without a plot I couldn't predict or characters I cared about, I hoped that veteran director Michael Bay would use the action scenes to save it. I have to admit, the moments right before the actual attack on Pearl Harbor are ominous and fearful, and the first ten minutes are first-rate. After that, though, it's like riding a roller coaster for forty minutes. The first time you watch Japanese Zeros strafe fleeing American troops, it's exciting. The fortieth time it's redundant. The Doolittle raid on Tokyo, which takes place after the battle the movie's named after, is a pointless addition to an already overextended enterprise, which would've been a lot better off without it. Arguably the dumbest part of the movie is when they crash land in China, and a few pilots armed with pistols kill what feels like an entire company of Japanese ground troops with rifles. Must be all that apple pie they eat.
After I could plainly see the director and writer throw in the towel and give up trying to make even a decent movie, I could expect the actors to do no more. Ben Affleck can be a good actor, but his performance here borders on jaw-droppingly awful. He squints a lot, with a fake Tennessee accent that fades in and out at random and at times he emotionally inflects his face, but not his voice, giving the impression of somebody having a very emotional time choosing what detergent to use at the laundromat. Kate Beckinsale is in over her head. With her woozy, breathless style of overacting, she should be in Diet Coke commercials, not movies. Josh Hartnett isn't quite as bad, but his character is so laughably underwritten that by the time he's become a Christ-like figure, there's nothing about him to ponder except how someone with such a girly haircut became an American pilot.
A bloated, overdone studio-funded corpse this is. One of the year's worst movies.