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Pearl Harbor Customer Reviews (124 - 126 of 144 Reviews)

Among the top ranking . . .
. . . of the worst war film ever produced. The plot of this film is stretched so thin it's likely to break. It certainly broke me from seeing any more trite films like it. A hot pilot with poor vision stretches his career from illegally flying for the RAF [against the wrong model of Bf109] to being one of the two Warhawk pilots to get aloft during the Pearl Harbour attack to flying a Mitchell bomber in the propaganda raid against Tokyo! Along the way he meets, gains and loses the girl. Of course, he retrieves her again, but this is Hollywood. What else could happen?

As if the plot wasn't thin enough, some clown put Afleck in the lead role. Someone should find Afleck a proper day job - cleaning the heads, dumping the honey wagon or robbing graves. Anything but putting him before a camera and inflicting that flat excuse for characterisation on an unsuspecting public. None of the actors in this film are given a proper role, with the sole exception of Jon Voight. Poor old Dan Ackroyd would have been super as the intelligence officer Ellis Zacharias, even if he is a bit plump for the part. Instead, he plays some ephemeral naval officer championing the defense of Pearl instead of the Philippines or Marianas Islands. Alec Baldwin is slipped in as Jimmy Doolittle, a role that, given the story line, should have been the lead. But then, of course, all that romantic lead-up would have been wasted. As was Baldwin.

It's difficult to understand the intent in making this film. All sense of why the Japanese launched the attack is blithely omitted. Justified or not, we are left with only the "day of infamy" attitude. There's relevance in presenting that, but Japan didn't launch the War of the Pacific on a whim. Their purpose, in their view, was to prevent encirclement. No lessons are to be derived from the story or the events portrayed. There was heroism on both sides, but you'd never glean that from watching this. Yamamoto's American experience and misgivings are overlooked, except for a single line. The Emperor's role, which was significant, is also omitted. The United States was attacked, suffering a terrible blow. Any military historian will explain it was a blessing in disguise as attention was diverted from the ungainly battleships to more flexible carrier flotillas. All this film portrays are implausible characters, a love story so trite as to be nauseating, and a surfeit of violence.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Ben Affleck Saves The Free World!
Putting an historical event of huge proportion like Pearl Harbor into the hands of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay is kind of like asking the folks who created Looney Tunes to produce a documentary on the Nuremberg trials.

"Pearl Harbor" emerges as a big, noisy, special effects laden cartoon with its centerpeice not really being December 7, 1941, but a cliche ridden love triangle between the movie's three stars(but then how else do you get the 12-17 year olds into a theater these days?).

The producers and writers of "Pearl Harbor" have taken the event that launched America into the second World War, added an "Armageddon"-like plot formula, some cardboard characters and have come up with a video-game simulation that falls just this short of trivializing history--Heaven help us if in sometime in the hopefully very distant future, this team gets its hands on 9.11.01

"Pearl Harbor" has its moments, though.

The recreation of the attack itself is nothing short of magnificent and Jon Voight's FDR is a pleasaure to watch.
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"Pearl Harbor" comes in a two disc package that incudes a "making of" documentary and a featurette about the real heroes of December 7, 1941.

Video and sound quality are excellent.

Boring, inacurate, superficial, what more can I say!
First off let me say that if Kate Beckinsale's character was a plain woman do you really think that those two guys would still fall in love with her?, hmmm I wonder! I have yet to see a movie of this caliber have a story like that {that would be absolutely sweet}. Also this film is an insult to the actual events that took place on that terrible day, not only to the dead but also the survivors of the actual Pearl Harbour tragedy. But likewise as a fictional film goes this is a demeaning and shallow, utterly stupid film that should not have been made. Avoid it please at all costs.

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