Rating: 
Summary: wrong message
Review: WHAT A JOKE! the only message in this film is : "Japan-BAD, USA-GOOD! it's OKAY if more than a MILLION Japanese CIVILIANS die (and are still suffering + dying till today due to radiation exposure) but it's BAD BAD BAD if 2,000+ American NAVY boys die"you know what.. right after the scene where the Japanese dropped a missile at one of those ships, the credits should have started rolling. i'm giving it a 2 star for the battle scenes that had pretty impressive cinematography. the rest.. a complete waste of time. ben affleck should be thrown out of the film biz.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, escapism, patriotic, feel-good film
Review: Take this for what it is: a film to watch, enjoy, cry and laugh and love the characters and leave feeling good. This is not intended to replace your history book, make you think deeply, or promote some sort of philosophical discussion. You are to gawk at Ben and Josh, wish you were Kate, marvel at the special effects, cheer for Cuba, and go home. If you have more expectations than that, you'll be fine.
Rating: 
Summary: Fairly Good Show, But Raises Some Questions
Review: This was an interesting computer-generated depiction of the famous episode that marked the entry of the United States into World War II. I am really curious, though, about the portrayals of Franklin Roosevelt and Jimmy Doolittle. They both acted as though they wanted nothing but to attack Japan in retaliation for this incident -- whereas in real life, Roosevelt was a liberal Democrat and Doolittle was played by Bush-hater Alec Baldwin. Shouldn't their first reaction, following the Pearl Harbor destruction, have been to ask themselves, "Why do they hate us?" Rather than organizing a counter-attack, shouldn't they have formed a coalition involving the United Nations? Instead of vowing to win the war, shouldn't they have adamantly insisted upon passing resolutions and sending inspectors to Tokyo? Rather than demanding victory, shouldn't they have hosted a gathering in the woods where Americans could have deeply contemplated the cultural and religious differences between Japan and the US? Shouldn't Franklin and Alec have been tolerant, diverse and inclusive? Their actions implied that the only way to stop a violent aggressor is to return the violence, and even more intently, which certainly isn't very compassionate. The screenplay had some serious problems -- Roosevelt and Baldwin didn't behave at all like the folks in their political party today.
Rating: 
Summary: i do not care!
Review: i do not care if this movie may be a rip off os titanic i still loved this movie, it is not as bad as people say it is!
Rating: 
Summary: Attack sequence too drawn out--kills the whole movie
Review: Look, unless you're a die-hard war movie freak, or a twisted teenager with a fascination for gore, you'll probably find it hard to take this movie. Critics said this movie was a throwback to the old war movies of the 40's...get real. Back then people knew how to make an intriguing movie without showing skin and blowing people to bits on camera. This movie was just Hollywood's attempt to use a significant historical event to recapture Titanic's blockbuster success. I don't want to pay money to hear "bang bang bang" for an hour and see flying body parts and people relentlessly suffering and dying. Yes, war happens and it's horrible and gruesome...do I want to pay $10 to watch it? Heck no.
Rating:
Summary: Lousy script, repetitive action..an insult to the real place
Review: So there's a script for "Pearl Harbor." It's bad. How bad? Imagine a dog writing it. Actually, Randall Wallace penned it. He wrote "Braveheart" and "The Patriot." These were not awful films, though neither were particularly accurate on the history front. "Pearl Harbor" is more accurate, but it's like a mini-outline with a poorly conceived love triangle in the middle. I've seen many 1940s movies, where actors fired off lines of wit and verve with the same energy. What is the assembled acting clan supposed to do with what passes for dialogue in this film? I don't know. Believe me, they didn't either. At the centerpiece of this three-hour clambake is a 40-minute invasion sequence, where Japanese planes descend upon battleships and airfields at the Hawaiian naval base. The director, Michael Bay, of many other loud, brogue action films, has made this sequence equally loud, and things blow up over and over as planes zoom, as they must, through the same mangled set of ship wreckage and ominous flotsam. How disappointing this melee of fireworks is. It's redundant for one, the action clearly dialed down to achieve a PG-13 rating. And though it's meant to be the payoff, of course it isn't, because we can barely understand the Japanese motives or strategy behind the attack, nor do we care to see Americans blown up continuously, in the exact same fashion as the last scene. Consider "Saving Private Ryan" for a second. Infinitely better film, but infinitely better in styling its combat scenes - it has a progression, for example, and innovation in terms of camera angles and point of view shots. "Pearl Harbor" steals all the choice shots from "Ryan" (the underwater cameras with bullets streaming by) and cuts at such a furious rate that the action becomes nonsensical. It is for this sequence that you're watching the film at all. That it doesn't deliver is reason for disappointment. Then you must consider what is around it - a story of supreme cliche and weariness, as born pilot Rafe (Ben Affleck) falls for nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) before volunteering to fly for the British Air Force against the German Luftwaffe. He leaves behind Evelyn and best friend Danny (Josh Hartnett), also a pilot. Rafe dies in action. The nurse and best friend get transferred to Pearl Harbor. Nurse and best friend spark relationship. Rafe returns (He was in occupied France! He couldn't get word! And all he thought of was Evelyn!). Anger and betrayal ensue, with more bad dialogue. The next day, they all live in infamy.
We're with these simpering flakes and their romantic overtures for 90 minutes before bombs fly. This is an attempt to steal the top off another film, "Titanic," which set forth a reasonable love story of some interest before iceberg, straight ahead. But Wallace, said screenwriter, whiffs. One cliche, or two, fine. But when there's a lone Irish pilot in the film, when he has red hair and wee mustache, when he speaks in a thick Irish stew accent, and when his name is Ian, the line I must draw. Bay hides his lack of storytelling skills by using the Jelly Belly palette of colors. I don't care if he can make a sky look nine different shades of aquamarine. How about not backlighting all scenes as if its showtime at the dinner theater? Or stopping the camera? Or refraining from the use of music better suited for "Rocky IV" in scenes that involve the Japanese? And, of course, "Pearl Harbor" ends dramatically upbeat, with the United States' pinkerton response over Tokyo on April 3, 1942, led by Captain Doolittle (a glistening Alec Baldwin) and his Raiders, of which Danny and Rafe are a part. It concludes with a speech of great overstatement by Evelyn that suggests after Doolittle's raid: "Japan knew nothing but defeat. And the United States knew but victory." That's just the kind of history "Pearl Harbor" chooses to serve up: that the U.S. then went on to pummel Japan at will for three years in the Pacific before dropping a couple atomic bombs in 1945 as a sundae cherry. Sure. And bats can see. "Pearl Harbor" is an unmitigated insult to the day and the place. The romance is pitched at an eighth-grade level, so the teens might like it, but I cringe at them thinking they've learned history here.
Rating:
Summary: Can anyone just rate this DVD instead of venting?
Review: First off, I'm sick of all these people bad mouthing this movie on this forum. I haven't seen this DVD but I'm giving it 5 stars because I like the movie. I'm not going to go into all this whatnots about historical accuracy. We all know by now this movie isn't historically accurate. All these reviewers are venting and are giving this DVD 1 star can kiss my ****. I mean seriously, I want to know about the DVD (picture, new scenes, etc.) and not about what they like about the movie. I've probably read more than two dozen reviews and haven't come accross one review worth mentioning about this DVD. I hope someone will come forward and write a review about this DVD and not vent.
Rating:
Summary: Anorism City
Review: Probably few historical movies have given me as much headaches as this movie. If you fell for the trailer like I did, you will know what I mean. If you haven't seen this movie yet, just go find the trailer for it...believe me you will get much more enjoyment from the trailer than from the actual movie. So whats wrong with this movie? How about every thing? Well not everything...Cuba Gooding, Jr plays some one who actually existed, and he pulls it off well, but he's only in ten minutes of the movie. So is the actual battle. If you are looking for a movie about "Pearl Harbor" this is not it. The Japanese are portrayed as James Bond villains (all Yamamoto needed was a cat to pet) who seem to be attacking Pearl Harbor just because they can. The Americans fall for the Japanese trap because, hey, they ignore Dan Akroyd. And that sums up the background for the battle. Next follows the Japanese shooting sailors in the water, then shooting up people on the road, then shooting up a hospital, then shooting up a church, then an elementary school... Then there's the Dolittle Raids. HA! Thought it was going to end after Pearl Harbor, didn't you? NOPE! The movie drags out for another thirty minutes, apparently because they didn't want to end with a battle America lost (Yamamoto says with a huge smile on his face, "I believe we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible fury!") But the biggest anorism comes at the end when the female character says: "After the Dolittle Raids, the Japanese realized they couldn't win and began to fall back." Uh huh. Right. That is biggest bunch of bull I have ever heard in a movie theater. Any one who knows the history of the Pacific campaign knows that the Japanese could probably have cared less about the Dolittle Raids. The writers must have never heard of the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Guadacanal, the invasion of the Philipines, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Come to think of it...I don't think the writers ever heard of the Battle of Pearl Harbor... If you want a Pearl Harbor movie, watch "Tora Tora Tora." It doesn't have characters going through a romantic crisis, but it has the battle its named after.
Rating:
Summary: The 'Showgirls' of War Movies
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: HURL HARBOR!
Review: This is a complete disaster! I had expected so much when I first went to go see this film in the summer of 2001. It sucked the big one!!! Stupid crappy characters, a poor soundtrack, and FAKE Special FX! Very unrealistic and NOT how it really happened at all! Cubba Gooding Jr. was probably the only thing that made this movie good because he's got alot of talent for an actor his age. Everything else was just bad! I don't know why everybody likes this garbage cause it's all very depressing and quite possibly one of the worst movies of all time next to "Saving Private Ryan". If you like those war movies then I think you'd be better off wathcing The Star Wars Trilogy even though it is all fictional. "TORA! TORA! TORA!" was the ONLY good Pearl Harbor film but they killed it when they made this! ...
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