Overall Rating
  Awesome: 11.24%
Worth A Look: 13.55%
Average: 7.93%
Pretty Bad: 20.99%
Total Crap: 46.28%
17 reviews, 503 user ratings
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| Pearl Harbor |
by Slyder
"Good Intentions But Serious Flaws"
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Every time you go to the movie theater you always hope that the movie your watching will pay off the hype that it has generated. Some times it pays off and you come out of the theater satisfied and great, and sometimes it doesn’t and you come out angry and pissed. I nearly came out like the last one. It isn’t that bad, since of course it entertains to a certain point. But the main factors fall flat on their face as we are taken into a badly staged pro-American movie that just can piss off every person that has known and studied history and the veterans that lived it first hand, in both sides.The film is the story of Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), guys that have been best friends since childhood, and have always had that passion to fly an airplane. Their dream comes true after enlisting to the US Army, and at that time the Army had airplanes (Its true!) and are under the command of Major James Doolittle (Alec Baldwin). Rafe is a more ambitious character and wants to join WWII despite the fact that the US are not in it yet so he does through the British army, leaving his girlfriend and Army nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) behind. During that time, both Evelyn and Danny are transferred to Pearl Harbor, while Rafe fights in England, but then Rafe is shot down and is declared dead. Both Evelyn and Danny are devastated that while trying to redeem themselves they both fall in love. But Rafe wasn’t dead; he survived and was rescued, by French civilians. When he returns he finds in shock what has happened to his love life and tries to live with it, but the time would be short since the Japanese navy has planned an attack on the Harbor to force the US to enter the War. This attack and the following American counteroffensive with the Doolittle Raid in Tokyo will put both friends to the test as they both try to dissipate their differences and try to help each other fight and survive the war.
What is it that you expected from Pearl Harbor? I guess that you expected first how did these three lives were interwoven with this historic date. Did you ever find anything historical that backed up this attack? Sure, were shown facts but we aren’t shown how they were developed or why the fuck did they developed that way. All I saw was a love triangle only affected by a fucking bombing of a place. The history is too trimmed and shown in a stupid way that it makes you want to laugh and rant at the stupidity of such actions. We shouldn’t laugh about it, but the film is mostly a soap opera on one of the worst days of American history, and there is almost no history at all. And if there is, its so shaky and poorly staged that makes you want to chuckle. The storyline at the end is more just about the love triangle than it is about Pearl Harbor, since they concentrate too much on these people than on the facts and stuff that preceded this attack. Historically it stinks, since it shows you facts of history, yes, but doesn’t even develop the history to make it more intriguing and fail to make such good use of it. Oh by the way, how the fuck could Rafe be transferred to England and fight the war if the US was at this time in neutrality? Wouldn't the Americans be contradicting themselves? Assholes.
Moving on with history, one thing that pissed me off was the stupidity of the American patriotism. Sure when I left the theater there were many people clapping their hands at the patriotic message at the end. I was so angry that I wanted everyone in that room to kiss my fat ass, because you Americans are too fucking proud of the later vengeance that you get, when the real fact is that for once your asses got kicked by a supposedly inferior force. See where I’m getting at? A word: balance. The Pearl Harbor attack is considered as a masterpiece of military strategy, and the movie just rips it off right from the start. The film fucks it on the Japanese side. We are only shown facts of the film, on how they planned the attack, but were only shown screenshots, and some other superficial shit that has no significance whatsoever on the importance of the attack. On the scenes of the planning there is no density, no development, no REAL answers to the why and how they did it. They only show a bunch of Japanese extras just wandering around with little toy ships and boards, like that part of history never meant shit. And there wasn’t even any important Japanese character that the film could follow, and the lines were so awful and so cold, with no emotion, that made me even more pissed at the unfair and banal treatment of the Japanese side. I just wanted to shoot Randall Wallace (the writer of the script) since in the end there is no balance between both sides. The Americans are seen as super heroes despite getting one up their rear end, and the Japanese are seen as evil yellow stupid trailer trash. Fuckers, I was so disgusted at that.
The attack scenes on the film are one of the few upsides of the film, and it somehow manages to get your attention, but in many parts of it, there is no soul to it. I mean what you see is men running around and getting killed by bombs and seeing just explosions, there is no moving moments, no pity, only empty excitement. On the Doolittle raid there is little shown, since you only see buildings being blown up and no other types of emotion, only the damn pro-Americanism of “die Japs, die.” With all the history of the raid unused, it just gives you the nauseatic feeling that you were watching more Hollywood-style revenge than a historical fact. Don’t even come to me with the comment that history is boring and useless, ‘cause I’ll fucking have you killed!!! History is brilliant when you know how to use it, it makes perfect plots for every film imaginable, but if you just use it like some fucked up rag, like this film did, it takes the flavor and the moral and human values of it and you’re left with some moronic shit.
Now I’m pretty sure that lots of people worked hard on this film since you can’t just spend like 160 million plus dollars on some ordinary shit movie. But since the filmmakers got caught with their heads up their ass never noticing the serious flaws in the script, then all that money is wasted. I feel sorry for both Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer because they used up every penny and it won’t pay off with this. They deserved better. Or maybe not, since they agreed to make this shit script a movie, so I guess they’re a pair of fucking idiots. The film intended good (or at least that’s what they made us believe), but unfortunately never truly delivers, and worst of all, it's so flawed that for many people it's unviewable. The performances were okay, but more was I impressed with Ben Affleck. He keeps forging on as a great actor, and his performance on this film shows it. My hat is off to him, and also my pity, since he also deserved a better script, his talent REALLY deserved a better script. The rest of the cast was okay, including Alec Baldwin and Jon Voight as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who are the only other ones that I really praise. Cuba Gooding Jr. was also good on his real-life portrayal of the cook in the machine gun, though the emotion that you get on his climatic scene is non-existent.In the end, this film completely disappointed me, since I really expected more, not this pile of celluloid shit. All I ever wanted to see was a fair ensemble of the tragic moments of that fateful December 7, but instead the film fails to do so, and it leaves you with more of a feud between lovers than the developments and consequences of the attack itself. Little and shallow was shown of its historical importance, and more bullshit patriotism and other moronic trash was shown, than the importance of this event on both countries. Go see it at your own risk, if you’re so much of a casual viewer or an entertainment buff or a soap opera fan, but to the people that want to see a historical epic, your best bet is to stay away and dig out and enjoy again “Tora, Tora, Tora.” (1.5-5)
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4724&reviewer=235
originally posted: 05/30/01 15:09:59
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USA
25-May-2001
UK
N/A
Australia
07-Jun-2001 (M)
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