Customer Reviews

Pearl Harbor (Widescreen Edition) [VHS]

5 star:		(464)
4 star:		(187)
3 star:		(157)
2 star:		(154)
1 star:		(359)

 

 

Why does Hollywood have to make a three hour movie about a terrible day in US history and turn it into 'As The World Turns'? I could not believe that I sat through this piece of junk. It was 2 1/2 hours of 'General Hospital' and 1/2 hour of reality. It's a shame that Hollywood feels that 99% of the films that come out today must contain some kind of soap opera setting to satisfy what they think the lady folks wish to see. I find that to be rather insulting to women and I am not a female. There is nothing romantic about December 7,1941. It gets 1 star for the actual attack sequence. I must mention that I highly doubt that while they flew over head, the Japanese pilots were signaling to the American children to take cover. Silliness. If you wish to see a great film on Pearl Harbor, seek out 'Tora! Tora! Tora!' and let this one rot.

The Vista Series has released the biggest and greatest DVD package ever assembled with "Pearl Harbor- The Director's Cut." The new 184 Minute cut is edited better. The attack sequence is more realistic and graphic, the reason for this cut's R-rating. And the four-disc set features hours of behind-the-scenes footage, two documentaries on the real attack and the Doolittle Raid, and commentary tracks from Michael Bay and Janine Basinger; Jerry Brucheimer, Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Alec Baldwin; The Director of Photography, Costume Designer, Visual Effects Supervisor and Composer. A great addition to the DVD collection. And if you think this is good, then get ready for the November release of "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring- The Director's Edition" four-disc set! Movie Grade: A+; DVD Grade: A+

This is probably the worst movie I've ever seen. The trouble is that young people watching it will be swept up by the various romantic angles and not realise that it is so factually inadequate. This is not the way it happened, make no mistake.

The historical details may not seem important to the average viewer but to anyone who has read anything on the subject it is verging on offensive to put this rubbish on screen. This is how Hollywood can misinform people and the punters who have not read anything about it should not be sacrificed at the altar of box office success. Just because it is not a documentary does not mean the public should be misled.

In terms of screenplay, this movie cannot be taken seriously as it does not seem to be able to decide exactly what its plot is. There are elements borrowed from "From Here To Eternity", "Tora, Tora, Tora", "Battle of Britain" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo", none of which it even comes close to emulating.

The characterisations are, at best, shallow and, at worst, positively painful and give the cast little in the way of development to work with. Thus their performances cannot be taken as seriously as one would like, especially in the light of some of their individual achievments in past productions. As for direction, there really isn't much.

There is much fudging of names; "Capt. Thurman" of the ONI, for example, is clearly a figment of the scriptwriter's immagination and a product of a total lack of research which would have turned up one "Capt. Alvin Kramer" had anybody bothered to find out. Dates and events are also copiuosly fudged for no real reason. There were no American pilots in the Battle of Britain and NOBODY used the Luftwaffe for target practice. What you end up with is a comic-book script to replace real American history, thus undermining the dignity and achievements of the participants in the real events. That is an unpardonable sin akin to trivialising.

The special effects were poor by comparison with other special effects films and I actually found the attack sequences rather boring. Bomb-cam is getting just a bit too predictable. The flight models are ridiculous and make a WWII Zero fly like an F-16. The "fighter-jock" mentality got very wearing, too. US pilots did not shoot down Japanese aircraft in droves in the early days; though some met with success. They had to re-write the manual just to survive against the considerably-more-experienced Japanese who had honed their skills after years of fighting in China. It was only after Midway that American pilots started to gain the upper hand.

Sending the cast to boot camp and getting the uniforms right cannot make up for the woeful inadequacies of "Pearl Harbor". This film really cannot be taken seriously and I think it should be sold with a warning. This system won't let me give it a zero so I have to give it an undeserved 1 star. Don't waste your money.

Lacking any kind of character development, this film falls far short of the bar set by other recent WWII movies, like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Both Raf (Affleck) and Danny (Harnett) waltz through the film without any change in their demeanor, remaining young cocksure pilots, untouched by the events surrounding them. The enemy here is faceless and politically correct while death is Disney-fied and sterile. Also, strangely absent is the character's racial hatred of the Japanese, characteristic of the period. Micheal Bay's strong point has always been his fast and innovative cinematography, but it alone cannot fill the gap left by a sub par script. Like Titanic, this film is good for one thing only, visual effects. Written by the screenwriter of BRAVEHEART, another film with more good press than actual substance, the only reason PEARL HARBOR should be purchased by anyone is ILM's fantastic special effects work. The attack sequence alone is well worth the price of the DVD. And the great thing about DVD? You don't have to fast forward to the good part.

I have to add my two cents to this atrocity of a film, and be at one with the mob howling for the head of the director, Michael Bay. This is the 'Showgirls' of American war movies, it's that bad. There, I've said it.

1. I understand that some Hollywood culture-vultures rounded up some actual veterans of the Pearl Harbor battle and "honored" them by exposing them to this film. I'd like to have been able to tell these unfortunate victims that those insensitive moguls are now safely tucked away at Guantanamo with blacked-out goggles and duct tape over their mouths. I really wish I could.

2. History? Oh, no, no, no. It is closer to a version of Army-Navy Comics from 1943, the one where American super-heroes take on Japs single-handed with super-neato flying tanks and rocket planes. See Rafe join the RAF to teach the Limeys how to really fly. See Rafe shoot down Jap Zeroes at Pearl Harbor piloting his P-40 like an X-Wing Starfighter, pausing to help out wounded Gis at the aid station, and then help rescue drowning sailors. See Rafe lead the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. See Rafe.... well, that would be giving away the movie's ending.

3. I recall watching a 1942 film on the late night, called "Air Force" or some such. In it, the last B-17 lands at Wake Island before the Japanese, rescues a Marine's puppy dog, and then flys on (the same flight) to blow the whole toy Japanese fleet out of the water. I guess that movie was 50 years ahead of its time.

4. If "Pearl Harbor" admitted to the world it was nothing more than a dime-store pulp adventure story a-la Indiana Jones, all this (well, leaving out the absurd and interminable menage-a-trois love story) would be moderately tolerable. But the horror of "Pearl Harbor" is that it panders to pass itself off as a serious and meaningful. This disqualifies the movie from status as a potential camp classic.

3. "Rafe?" When was the last time you encountered anyone named "Rafe?" The last "Rafe" I remember was in Carol Burnett's brief and now sadly unavailable 1980s miniseries, "Fresno", a comic parody of the popular evening soap, "Falcon Crest", which hilariously substituted a raisin plantation for `Falcon Crest's' winery. In "Fresno", `Rafe' was a bare-chested stud who strolls around rescuing farm-workers from bullies, etc. Burnett would wrap her lips around the name, "Rafe...Rafe..." Well, I guess you had to see it.

4. The Japanese are to this movie what the icebergs are to the Titanic, an random act of God interrupting a love story. Sort of a "Days of Our Lives" meets the Lusitania.

5. No one plays baseball at 7 am on a Sunday morning in December. Others have pointed this out. Mistakes like this are important.

Parental advisory: repeated viewing will make your children retarded, and flunk U.S. History. The war scenes are done in post-PR (Private Ryan) style and are therefore somewhat graphic.

This must be one of the worst movies ever made in the history of Hollywood. Nothing about this movie ring true and it have to be one of the most insulting movies to Pearl Harbor veterans ever made - even if you happened to be a Japanese veteran! None of the characters are believable, the love interest felt so superifical that you are in awe of the actors who actually went through the motion. The attack on Pearl Harbor have to be one of the greatest fisco ever shot on film. All the fake smoke, noise and destruction. Worst of all were the manipulative emotional chain yanking. The sad thing was, the attack on Pearl Harbor was so poorly done that it almost look comical and unless you are a total dunce, you know that you are having your chain yanked so entire sequences looked like a put on job. I can't believed that they opened this movie on an aircraft carrier at Pearl Harbor with invited veterans of the attack. What a torture that must have been!! Funny thing about this movie was that nothing worked. Love story don't work, military history don't work and acting don't work. I think the movie insulted just about every one involved presently and all those who were there back in 1941.

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone only interested in seeing a movie about Pearl Harbor. It it a sappy story wrapped around a real event. You must suspend all sense of reality to take in this movie

Where to begin?
OK.
Why in Heaven's name would the producers go through all the effort to digitally recreate "Battleship Row" and waves upon waves of attacking Japanese aircraft, only to show a US NAVY NIMITZ Class nuclear carrier in another scene, and try to palm it off as a Japanese carrier? And the footage of the TICONDEROGA Class Guided Missile Cruisers (First commissioned in 1980), interspersed with the WWII battleships getting blown up, was another anachronistically lovely touch as well.
Add to this a sophomoric love triangle to titillate the pre-pubescent girls (and some of their mothers) in the audience, and pitch it all as a tribute to the fighting men of WWII, and you have the recipe for a totally overhyped, "film that will live in infamy".
The most enjoyable part of the tape, for me, was the "History Channel" program that followed the movie, and showed actual footage from 1941, and told the story of some of the unsung heroes of that day. It's a shame that the producers couldn't spare a few minutes from their three hour long tribute to "Love Story", so rudely interrupted by a few obligatory battle scenes, to do justice to these brave men's story.
Do yourself a favor and get the Widescreen version of "Tora, Tora, Tora" instead. No digital "magic", but an infinitely better telling of the story of the "date that will live in infamy". Sorry girls, no Ben Affleck either.

By the way, the passenger car outside Ben Affleck's train window, "Silver Horizon" was built for the "California Zephyr" in 1948, 7 years after Pearl Harbor. But that's being real picky, I know.

Let this be said at the outset, Touchstone Pictures' "Pearl Harbor" will not go down in cinematic history as the greatest film ever made. There are points of corny dialogue, as an actual history it is a disaster, and at some of its most crucial moments, the story suddenly goes oddly flat. Yet, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, it works reasonably well as an evocation of how the nation saw itself seeing itself, as well as providing some undeniably spectacular special effects and a love story that is better than the critics have made it out to be.

The story is fairly straightforward. Two boys who grew up together as best friends fascinated by the daring-do of the World War I air aces, join the Army Air Corps on the eve of World War II. The older man, Rafe (Ben Affleck), is cocky, self-assured, and eager to be a hero. The younger man, Danny (Josh Hartnett), is sensitive, somewhat shy, and was presumably traumatized by his father's emotional breakdown after fighting in the trenches of France during the Great War. When Rafe joins the Eagle Squadron, a British unit for American volunteer pilots, and is subsequently presumed killed in action, Danny first comforts, and then falls in love with, Rafe's girlfriend, a Navy nurse named Evelyn - played by the lovely Kate Beckinsale. On the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, Rafe returns - it transpires that he had been rescued by a French fishing boat and was hiding out in occupied France - causing a love triangle that is interrupted by the Japanese attack. In the end, Rafe and Danny reconcile just before both participate in the April, 1942 Dollittle raid on Tokyo, with Evelyn waiting back at Pearl to find out if her men will make it home from the mission.

The critics have said that the portrayal of the attack is the strongest part of the film and that the love story is dispensable. Actually, the reverse is true. For a student of history, the "historical" aspects of the film are either inaccurate, incomplete, or simply false. Speaking as a Washington, DC area resident, it is unclear why the local audience did not break out in giggles when the Navy Department building that appears on screen is actually the House side of the U.S. Capitol. (One wag called it the Navy Department's House of Representatives annex.) The battle scenes, though indisputably gripping, are almost too glitzy, with Japanese and American warplanes performing tactics best suited to Star Wars X-wing fighters, and at least one shot with 1990's vintage aircraft carriers being included in a "fleet at sea" scene. This is mostly good visual stuff, but for anyone with a little historical knowledge, it is distracting. (One big exception - the sequence showing the capsizing of USS Oklahoma is very well done.)

The love story, on the other hand, has all of the feel of a 1943 vintage romance and war movie. Somewhat hokey and a little overwought, but nevertheless compelling. The viewer gets a feel not so much for the times themseleves, but for the cinema at a time when Americans went to the movies both for entertainment and for reaffirmation. The movie evokes the world as it was in 1941 as viewed through the prism of moviegoers during the war and its immediate aftermath. It is a mixture of innocence, foreboding, nostalgia and cliche.

To be certain, sometimes the story falls flat. Although Affleck, Beckinsale and Harnett all put in good performances, they do not have enough time - even in a three hour movie - to convey all the information that the viewer needs to be fully engaged with the characters. (The novel that came out with the movie fills in many gaps.) Also, the scene where Evelyn sees Rafe alive for the first time is oddly muted. Evelyn is shocked at first, but moves straight to confusion over her feelings for both Rafe and Danny. The expected intervening step - joy at seeing Rafe alive - never transpires, making the whole scene seem an anti-climax.

Also, the movie never makes explicit that although Evelyn loves Danny, Rafe is her true love. Instead, she is made to seem that she is not making a choice, thereby draining some of the dramatic oxygen. Nor does it clearly explain on what basis Rafe and Danny seem to reconcile, instead there is a scene in which both characters seem to go from wary antagonism to renewed affection in a split second. (Again, the book clarifies much.)

One other peculiar aspect of the movie is its rather grim tone - surprising in a summer movie. Although Wallace and Bay work tirelessly to bring out themes of pride and patriotism, they never fully succeed. It is just too hard to look at wrecked battleships and shattered corpses to feel all that good. Even the end sequences, which are emotionally the most powerful - and arguably the best dramatice scenes - in the movie, do not create feelings of patriotism so much as a sense of wistfulness. The audience feels happy for the characters, but it is mixed with a sense of loss. This will probably be effective with older audiences, but may lack the emotional lift that the under 30 crowd seems to require of its movies.

Notwithstanding these weaknesses, the "period" feel of the movie works. The viewer gets a glimpse of movies circa 1943. Oddly, "Tora! Tora! Tora!," which is an outstanding and historically more accurate movie, fails to deliver in this category - the characters in that movie could as easily be in 2001 as 1941. (As to those critics who complain that "Pearl Harbor" is not about Pearl Harbor, you probably name your cats, Kitty, and your dogs, Spot.)

As to the performances, almost all the cast perform well, if not always up to their finest earlier work. Affleck is convincing as the cocky pilot, and his sequences with Beckinsale demonstrate the same kind of restrained, and for that seemingly more authentic, emotion as he showed as the cocky ad agent in "Bounce." (Though, overall, he is better in "Bounce.") Beckinsale is gorgeous in 1940's vintage attire and hairstyle and brings off even the most cliched lines - and she gets her fair share - with a naturalness that makes them acceptable to 21st century audiences. Hartnett has the toughest job as the introspective Danny in a cast of very prominent characters, but pulls it off to remarkable effect.

As to Cuba Gooding Jr., Dan Akroyd, Jon Voight, Alec Baldwin and the rest of the cast, all do creditable work. The one exception is the Japanese actor, Mako, whose Admiral Yamamoto is played without the subtlety that Soh Yamamura brought to the role in "Tora!, Tora!, Tora!." An occassional physical gesture, such as shaking his head with regret when he delivers the obligatory -for Pearl Harbor movies - "sleeping giant" line, might have made his character seem more real. Instead, each line is delivered as if Yamamoto was reading a cue card. (NOTE to the subtitle writer: It's "The rise OR fall of our empire..." not, "The rise AND fall of our empire...")

Taken together, "Pearl Harbor" is not the strongest movie, but its feelings are real and it definitely taps into the anxiety, harshness,beauty, courage, and heroism that Americans equate with the movies of that period. That probably accounts for "Pearl Harbor's" bad reviews. The critics, and unfortunately probably most younger audiences, want an action story or a love story, and cannot relate very much to, or empathize with, evocations of a world long since past and that seems, in retrospect, pitiably naive. That is sad, but less for the talented and underapprecited cast and crew of "Pearl Harbor," than for the viewers who will see it.

I'm a decorated Viet Nam Vet. Although I thought I had it pretty tough over there, I realize it was nothing compared to what faced our soldiers in WWII.

My father was a WWII vet as were most of my uncles. They seldom talked about it, but I saw tears in their eyes when I would ask them pointed questions about their experiences.

For those who have never experienced war, you will never understand the terror of it. For those who poke fun at it, or make it into something it isn't shame on you!!!

Filmakers should take the time to be realistic and accurate as possible...especially about something as serious as this!!