Pearl Harbor is the typical love triangle between "two friends and the woman they love". The one friend is presumed lost in combat, so his buddy moves in on his girlfriend to comfort her, and well one thing leads to another, the girlfriend gets pregnant, the dead friend returns from the dead and we end up with a big mess on our hands. This is the kind of junk that television soap operas could do in their sleep, but for some reason the screenwriter couldn't seem to work up the energy to make this interesting.
The love story is resolved by having the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, destroy the United States pacific fleet, kill thousands of sailors and blow up most of Hawaii which seems like overkill to resolve everyone's personal and romantic problems.
There are a few positives to this movie. Nobody stages big action scenes like Michael Bay, he is the master. You actually get a feeling for what the attack might have been like that day, with the planes flying in low, the men trapped in the sinking ships, and the panic of the US military during the attack.
As usual the Japanese military plans the attack moving little toy ships around a big map, and a lot of the dialog is pretty lame. The actors actually are pretty decent. Ben Affleck does a good job as the guy who returns from the dead. The woman playing the nurse and girlfriend of Ben Affleck, isn't bad. Jon Voight is good as FDR, as is Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle. What's his name, Josh Hartnett makes no impression at all, but he is a nice pretty boy. Dan Ackroyd is extremely miscast as a naval intelligence officer, and shatters the believably of the film whenever he's on screen.
Pearl Harbor is a failure but it's not the worst epic ever put on screen. However it doesn't appear to be what was intended when they filmed it.
Written by Randall Wallace, the running time is an epic 183 minutes
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1 comment:
What about Cuba Gooding Jr. You did not talk about his performance in the film.
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