Pearl Harbor
Tags: realism, murder, dramatic, thought-provoking, flashback, action, romantic, historical, entertaining, sentimental

Plot synopsis:
In 1923 Tennessee, two young boys, Rafe McCawley (Jesse James) and Danny Walker (Reiley McClendon), play together in the back of an old biplane, pretending to be soldiers fighting the Germans in World War I. After Rafe's father lands his biplane and leaves, Rafe and Danny climb into the plane and Rafe accidentally starts it, giving the boys their first experience at flight. Rafe manages to stop the plane at the end of the runway, but Danny's father beats Rafe and Danny for climbing into the plane. Rafe stands up to Danny's father calling him a "dirty German." However, Danny's father then reveals that he fought the Germans in World War I, and that he prays no one will ever have to experience what he experienced.
Eighteen years later, in January 1941, Danny (Josh Hartnett) and Rafe (Ben Affleck) are both first lieutenants under the command of Major Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin). Doolittle informs Rafe that he has been accepted into the Eagle Squadron (a RAF outfit for American pilots during the Battle of Britain). A nurse named Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) meets Rafe and passes his medical exam despite his dyslexia. That night, Rafe and Evelyn enjoy an evening of dancing at a nightclub and later a jaunt in New York harbor in a borrowed police boat. Rafe shocks Evelyn by saying that he has joined the Eagle Squadron and is leaving the next day.
Danny, Evelyn and their fellow pilots and nurses are transferred to Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, Rafe flies in numerous dogfights with the RAF against the Luftwaffe, becoming a flying ace, but is shot down over the English Channel and presumed to be killed in action. Danny gives Evelyn the news and she is devastated. Three months later, Evelyn and Danny begin to develop feelings for each other. Danny takes Evelyn on a sunset flight over the harbor and the two begin a relationship.
On the night of December 6, Evelyn is shocked to discover Rafe standing outside her door, having survived his aircraft crash. He goes to the Hula bar where he is welcomed back by his overjoyed fellow pilots. Danny finds Rafe in the bar with the intention of making things right, but the two get into a fight. They drive away, avoiding being put in the brig when the authorities arrive at the bar. The two later fall asleep in Danny's car.
Early the next morning, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy begins its attack on Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona is obliterated when an armor-piercing bomb detonates the ship's forward ammunition magazine, literally lifting the bow out of the water. The USS Oklahoma capsizes after several torpedoes strike her, trapping hundreds of men inside. On the USS West Virginia suffers severe damage. One bomb mortally wounds Captain Mervyn S. Bennion (Peter Firth). Cook Dorie Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.), with no training with firearms, mans a .50 caliber machine gun and shoots down a Japanese plane. The USS Nevada makes a run for the sea, becoming a primary target during the second wave. Danny and Rafe drive away in search of a still standing airfield, while Evelyn and the other nurses rush for the hospital. The nurses struggle to give emergency treatment to hundreds of injured. Rafe and Danny manage to get in the air in two P-40s. After causing four planes to crash into each other and another getting shot down by ground fire, the two shoot down seven Japanese Zeros. After landing, the two donate blood, rescue the men out of the capsized USS Oklahoma, and try to rescue the men out of the sinking remains of the USS Arizona, but are too late.
The next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Jon Voight) delivers his Day of Infamy Speech to the nation and asks the US Congress to declare a state of war with the Empire of Japan. The survivors attend a memorial service to honor the numerous dead, including fellow nurses and pilots. Later, Danny and Rafe are assigned to travel stateside under newly promoted Lt. Colonel Doolittle for a secret mission. Before they leave, Evelyn reveals to Rafe that she is pregnant with Danny's child and that she will remain with Danny.
Upon their arrival in California, Danny and Rafe are both promoted to Captain and awarded the Silver Star. Doolittle asks them to volunteer for a top secret mission, which they both accept. During the next three months, Rafe, Danny and other pilots train with specially modified B-25 Mitchell bombers. In April, the raiders are sent towards Japan on board the USS Hornet, and are informed that their mission will involve bombing Tokyo and then landing in China. However, the Japanese discover them early, forcing the raiders to launch from a longer distance than planned. After a successful bombing run against Tokyo, the raiders crash-land on Japanese-occupied territory in China in a rice paddy. The Japanese Army pin down Rafe's plane, but Danny's crew flies over and shoots the Japanese patrol before crashing. Danny is shot during the attack by Japanese patrols while the other pilots, Red (Ewen Bremner) and Gooz (Michael Shannon), kill the remaining Japanese patrolmen. Danny tells Rafe that he will have to be the father and dies. Back in California, a pregnant Evelyn sees Rafe getting off the aircraft, carrying Danny's coffin. Afterward, Evelyn and Miller are awarded medals and Rafe is awarded his medal by President Roosevelt. Rafe and Evelyn, now married, visit Danny's grave with Danny and Evelyn's infant son, also named Danny. Rafe then asks his son if he would like to go flying, and they fly off into the sunset in the old biplane that his father once had.

Review: In 1941 it cost the Empire of Japan 147 thousand dollars to stage the three hour attack on Pearl Harbor.In 2001 Michael Bay spent $132 MILLION dollars to film the event, and ran four minutes longer.
The recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbor is some of the best film-making ever - an extraordinary and moving sequence made utterly believable by state of the art special effects.
But like both those other two films, PEARL HARBOR is desperately in need of a decent script to frame the disaster sequence.Okay - I could almost accept the hokey old love triangle romantic plot - certainly the stars are great to look at - but the dialogue really sucked: "I don't think I'll ever look at another sunset without thinking of you".
I mean we all know that America won the war in the end, so did we really need this long epilogue?Personally I'd cut out all the Roosevelt and the Japanese high command scenes and concentrate on the experiences of the people on the ground at Pearl Harbor.
OK the action sequences are fantastic, the music is wonderful & gripping, the Pearl Harbor attack was intense, it was at many points very emotional and made you a bit teary eyed because you feel for all the brave men & women who died on that faithful day in December 1941.
Now lets get down to why this is movie failed miserably: 1.) First off the movie is way too damn long, I mean Jesus I would have to spend have a day to watch it so the makers failed to edit many scenes that didn't need to be in the film.2.) Historical inaccuracies are everywhere.
thousand of good men died that day so tragically in one of the most defining moments of American History and you wanna make a movie centered around fake characters and a cheesy love story.
I knew that special effects technology had advanced enormously since 1970, allowing the filming of things that would have been impossible in the previous big-budget movie about Pearl Harbor, Tora Tora Tora.So I thought "Given all this, how bad can it be?".The answer, unfortunately, is AWFUL.
Both films feature trite, sappy, predictable love stories (with every chestnut in the Hollywood Cliché guide clearly in evidence) layered over a real-life, tragic event.
I am prepared to watch Titanic (while fast-forwarding over the love story bits) just to see the history parts.Pearl Harbor fails this test.
The portion of the film featuring the attack on Pearl Harbor comes off like a video game -- Lots of sound and fury, but no realism whatsoever.
The late Brigadier General Kenneth Taylor, one of the pilots who did in real life what Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett portray on screen described the film as "a piece of trash...over-sensationalized and distorted."Watch Tora Tora Tora instead.
The unconventional romantic relationship and the intimate scenes between the lovers spice up the movie and give a new twist to the plot.If you want to feel the thrill and the emotion of being at war and love at the same time, of being away from home, of being behind enemy lines, and of leading your country to victory, go and watch Michael Bay's extraordinary take on the events leading up to and involving thereof one of the most disastrous catastrophes of the era.Michael Bay never misses a chance to leave his viewers awestruck with his action packed works, with strands of deadly love.
The fact that they advertised this film as one thing (the attack on pearl harbor) and actually gave us another (love triangle drama before, after, and during pearl harbor).So little time was spent on the actual battle and the memorable instances within it that one wondered if they had even bothered to research it.
Sure as hell I won`t be wasting too much time writing a long review .I hated this movie , it`s so full of anachronisms and cliches and I`m so glad everyone else has pointed them out , but the two ones that made me laugh were Josh Hartnett announcing " World War Two has just started " .
This film also features Cuba Gooding Jr. who plays Captain Dorie Miller, the first African- American in history to be awarded the U.S Navy Cross.The bombing of Pearl Harbor was one of the most shocking moments in the history of America, and it makes interesting subject matter to be told on on screen.
Although this movie does manage to paint the horrors that took place during that fateful day, this film does suffer from some flaws that director Michael Bay is often known.
Now with a war movie being directed by Bay, audience should go into this movie expecting abundance of explosions and this film plenty of these during the 40-minute action sequences that takes place during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Along with the whole Japanese attack and its aftermath, audiences are treated with a romantic subplot involving Josh Hartnett, Ben Affleck, and Kate Beckinsale that takes up a good portion of the film.
Pearl Harbor is certainly not one of the best war movies in Hollywood and definitely not the best of what Michael Bay has to offer.
Put extremely attractive young men and women into the fashions of 1941 but with the moral attitudes of the 21st century, add special effects, completely throw out any basis in actual fact in order to get an emotional reaction from the audience (here the film succeeds for all the wrong reasons), add a few rousing speeches, and you have Pearl Harbor.
The only good thing about this film are the special effects, and even then I prefer the more primitively done Tora,Tora,Tora from thirty years before because it actually tells the truth about what led up to the raid in painstaking detail, actually taking the time to show what is going on with both the Japanese and the Americans and the mistakes and misjudgments made on both sides.
Its the sort of movie anyone would expect to be an accurate enough dramatisation of events that actually happened.Instead what we get is an attempt to make another Titanic by including a love triangle that is dominant over the whole history aspect.
They join the United States Army Air Corps in 1941 and both show an ability at being daring pilots while training under the command of Jimmy Doolittle, in Long Island...Their life is changed when they encounter a beautiful dedicated nurse called Evelyn Johnson...Rafe falls for Evelyn and volunteers for service in the Battle of Britain He continues his love affair by letters with Evelyn who ends up with Danny in Hawaii - Pearl Harbor, where the US Pacific fleet is gathered at rest...
We see hundreds of Japanese planes approaching towards their unsuspecting targets Sailors sauntering along the decks of their moored vessels when the torpedo planes, armed with special shallow-running devices, headed for the battleships, their prime targets Bay's cameras move sometimes fast, and sometimes in slow motion to show the savage blow Scenes, out of focus, evoke the sense of disorientation and fear, also of bravery in the midst of confusion in the island's base hospital...'Pearl Harbor' is a fight between love and glory against a backdrop of America's entry into World War II...
This film was obviously made for an audience that has no conception on what "Pearl" was all about, and will probably never know the real facts due to the politically correct blame America first attitude in contemporary left-wing dominated Hollywood.Basically it's a love story set against the events.
The worst thing about Pearl Harbor is that there are people who will believe that this is how the attack on Pearl Harbor really happened.If you like this movie, you will never be a friend of mine!
In the rush of quasi-historical movies that have come in the past five years (reaching a box-office high with 1997's Titanic), the moviegoing public has demonstrated a willingness to sit through films they may have suffered through in grade school in order to get a better sense of what it was actually like to be there, to see the things that happened, to hear the whistles of bombs dropping in the air, and, above all, to experience what really happened.Michael Bay's presence can be seen throughout the entire movie's content.
The blooming romance between Affleck and Evelyn (Kate Beckinsall), his duty nurse during combat training, begins with a humorous and touching effect, but sooner or later we have to acknowledge the fact that they're in love because there's a war going on rather than any heartfelt connection made within three weeks' time.
This type of pathos demands a lot of feeling for scarcely-viewed characters, and it gets in the way of many of the film's better points.The actual attack on Pearl Harbor is conveyed brilliantly.
How likely is it that an American fighter pilot flying for the British would end up in Hawaii just in time for the "big attack" and then be switched to flying bombers days after the attack.If you want to see a good movie on Pearl Harbor, you have to go back to "Tora, Tora, Tora" or for carriers in the Pacific, "Midway".
I was looking forward to this movie when it came out, because I had studied World War II religiously and I couldn't believe this monstrosity of a film.Ben and Josh play Rafe and Danny, two American boys who grew up together and are in the army.
Eve is pregnant with Danny's baby; but that's the least of their problems when the evil Japenese are thinking about bombing an unexpecting army base, Pearl Harbor.The movie then just turns into nothing but action and makes the audience forget that this was real.
From glossy photography, beautiful wide-angle shots, eye-widening special effects and exceptionally good-looking people playing the lead characters, it offers a lot of eye candy to those who are willing to sit through the long movie.
In fact, it reminds me of a big cake with a recipe in which the makers tried to include all the tried-and-true ingredients of a commercially successful movie: visual treats, humor, drama, action and a story involving love, passion, friendship, vengeance and a good dose of patriotism.
"Saving Private Ryan" is an outstanding example of showing the emotions of war and evoking feelings whilst telling a war story.Or, make the movie about a love triangle and find some minor battle to get in the way of the friendships without being the main event.
Then you have time to develop a relationship between the characters and allow the audience to feel something with them and for them.This movie was ala "Titanic", in the attempt to mix love and tragedy, but "Titanic" was even better able to succeed at mixing the two than "Pearl"..
Never mind the plagiarism of other, better movies; the empty-headed and monumentally annoying love story; the pathetic so-called "acting" (only Dan Aykroyd and Tom Sizemore make any sort of impact); the banal script and laughable dialogue; the cheesy music and rock video editing; or the gee-whizz attitude to violence and explosions.
Of course, if you like laughing at how idiotic Americans are, you have plenty of opportunities, for example, when one of the characters shouts "I think World War II just started" - in 1941.The acting wasn't half bad, but unfortunately the actors had very little to work with.
His best friend played by Josh Hartnet, is also a pilot but he stays in Pearl Harbor and then falls in love with Ben Affleck character's girlfriend.
I thought it was just "bad" after the first time, but now i think that is is simply THE WORST PIECE OF S..T THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE IN HOLLYWOOD.This movie is an insult to every soldier who fought in Pearl Harbor or any other battle of WW2.
Of course, there is great special effects in the battle sequences and the soundtrack is absolutely wonderful, especially the Japanese-themed music, but that is not enough to redeem this film from the bad points.DIRECTION: Not too impressed.
This script just didn't have enough gas to propel its 3 hour span, even with the love story intertwined.Also, for me, a lot of the fighter scenes looked too "Star War-ish" with the CGs, although using real restored fighters exclusively is understandably cost-prohibitive for even a large-budget Hollywood flick.If you want to see a good Pearl Harbor film, check out "Tora Tora Tora." While not as "pretty" as the 2001 version, the 1970 film has way more substance and authenticity..
I could spend an entire day writing about the historical inaccuracies, the mundane acting, the clichéd story and the disgust that WWII veterans feel when movies like `Pearl Harbor' are made.
Upon exiting the theater after "Pearl Harbor," I was set upon by a man who referred to the American officials portrayed in the film as "bumbling idiots." It's a good thing he said "Americans," because he easily could've been speaking about Rafe, Danny and Evelyn, the trio involved in a love triangle plot that is one of the movie's pitfalls.
Circumstances intervene, and Rafe returns to find that Danny and Evelyn are now lovers, casting the whole relationship into strife just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese air forces.The movie tries unsuccessfully to balance the love story with historical facts and events.
The movie does well with this entire sequence, not only because of some spectacular special effects, but because the love story characters are left alone to perform their real duties, leaving behind the sap and giving us a real taste of human drama.In summation, "Pearl Harbor" does not live up to the hype surrounding it.
You find the actor Ben Affleck in both movies but he's better in "Pearl Harbor" than in "Armageddon" because he manages to avoid third-rate acting.
The action sequences are certainly impressive but they are crushed by special effects (when Affleck and Hartnett pilot fighter planes against Japanese pilots, you feel that you are inside a video game!).From a historical point of view, the movie only suggests an academic vision of the Pearl Harbor tragedy and we learn nothing new.Nevertheless when the film focuses on the very moving hospital sequences, Michael Bay knows how to create emotion.At the end, the whole gives a heterogeneous, shaky and conventional movie..
Unlike movies like the MUMMY RETURNS the effects characters and script are brilliant.No review would be complete without a mention of Michael Bay a excellent director who makes this film a triumph.10 out of 10.
If you're interesdted in the actual history of Pearl Harbor and/or want to see a better paced, more watchable film, see "Tora, Tora, Tora" instead.
A really bad soap opera!!!!A 1 out of 10.PS the 15 minute Japanese attack scene on Pearl Harbor had good special effects just for that 15 minutes stretch of time.
STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All CostsIt was interesting to see how blockbuster meistros Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay would make an action oriented film without all the modern,high tech gadgets,and Pearl Harbor showed the result of this.But it still can't beat the sincere humanity and internal fulfillingness of the best war film of recent years,Saving Private Ryan,released three years ago in 1998.But there are other problems hampering Pearl Harbor as well.The love story is cliched,the acting is hammy and there are long,boring parts.However,during the attack sequence,the special effects,which,let's face it,are what a large majority of the audience have come to see it for,truly deliver.Certainly not oscar worthy,but entertaining eye candy at history's expense all the same.***.
Forget the bad reviews of the critics, judge for yourself!Forget the true history, you are going to see a film not a documentary!Pearl Harbor is a must see, just go and enjoy the special effects, the fictitious story-line and the acting!.
It is so horribly dumbed-down that it no longer is a story about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor an event that plays crucial role on the outcome of the war no no.
Bay directs it like an extended action sequence from "Bad Boys", he doesn't take his time in showing the effects of war on people or showing the darker parts of the bombing (namely blood, gore) no, all he cares is getting that PG-13 rating so that more kiddies will go see it.
That movie isn't as bad as you thought." So I give 0 stars for the first 90 minutes and the dreary love story and 5 for the attack on Pearl Harbor..
That makes me think how silly are people who cannot appreciate this movie.Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Empire of Japan, and the American democracy entered the war to protect its freedom.
It didn't.The story is an American love triangle that gets interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1942, no I'm not going into more detail than that, as I purely cannot be bothered to waste my time on it.
I didn't know Pearl Harbor was a love story!.
If you watch film to enjoy a quality script, good acting, and necessary action then keep looking.I would like to say that we should all remember Pearl Harbor for what it was, it is a memory we shall never forget.
Pearl Harbor is an excellent action/love story based on a historical moment in time..
I feel bad for hating this film so deeply because the event that it is about is not one that should be screwed around with, and with such a tragic event you would hope that all the people who decide to do stories about it do it with care and respect for the event.Basically what this is is a three way love triangle in which the event of Pearl Harbor just so happens to happen right in the background.