Yet director Michael Bay already has conceded that his film won't satisfy every historian, military buff or Pearl Harbor survivor. The reasons have as much to do with the art of history as of film. Questions about historical integrity surface as often as filmmakers turn to the past.
History is subjective, and both filmmakers and historians bring points of view.
So the standard doesn't really call for a cinematic recitation of facts. Nonetheless, the questions being put to filmmakers reveal a general uneasiness with stories that are not fundamentally honest. Americans increasingly get their history from film, whether motion picture, TV miniseries or documentary. It's something that Thomas Edison understood as early as 1914, when he made a silent movie about the midnight ride of Paul Revere. The inventor didn't know how right he was.