The Good, the Bad, the Pus-filled

Rating: 1/10 (6 January 2003)

Yuck!
Okay, in more detail:
The acting is atrocious. The story is cliched. The dialogue is unlikely in extremis. Only the special effects are worthwhile. They're nearly perfect -- although I don't think Michael Bay's preference for green Zeroes (for artistic purposes) justifies their overabundance (the Kate torpedo- and high-level-bombers were in an olive green mottle; the Val dive bombers and Zero fighters were almost exclusively in the Imperial Japanese Navy's blue-grey [almost a dove grey]).
Can fighter jocks be retrained to fly twin engine medium bombers, on the whim of the CO? Would they want to be? I doubt the Army Air Force could have spared experienced fighter pilots in the spring of 1942, and besides, all 16 pilots and 16 co-pilots on the Doolittle raid are accounted for: none of them was a recently re-trained fighter pilot, and none of them had been at Pearl Harbor. And none of them were Welch or Taylor, the two American pilots who made it into the air on 7/12/41.
The modern warships masquerading as pre-WWII warships look as out of place as an M-16 in the Civil War. Their bows are way too sharp, the biggest giveaway.
With all that money to burn, this movie does a disservice to history, to war movies -- even to Romance.
Avoid at all costs!