With enormously expensive films such as Pearl Harbor, AI, Lord Of The Rings and Jurassic Park III all appearing soon at a theatre near everyone, the public has every right to believe that it will get at least one more chance to smirk knowingly before the summer season is over. In this context, a brief review of Pearl Harbor is in order. Almost all of this was spent blowing up Hawaii. Titanic, the film on which Pearl Harbor is loosely based, also had a preposterously insipid screenplay, but it grossed more money than any film in history because James Cameron had the wisdom and foresight to spend all his money on special effects, effectively ignoring the purists' complaint about the simple-minded plotline. What Cameron and Bay recognise is that the public is willing to do without a plausible, historically accurate or even intelligible storyline so long as a major nautical disaster is depicted in a viscerally compelling fashion.
Romance is a way of buying time until the fireworks begin.
Without these mawkish sequences, these films might have cost real money. For a clearer perspective on this principle, take the case of The Mummy Returns. With one notable exception. In contrast to the frighteningly realistic zombies who regularly surface earlier in the motion picture, the Scorpion King looks like a fugitive from an unpopular Nintendo game. It is my belief that in this case the director wasted far too much money on the cast and the screenplay and simply ran out of cash by the end of the film.