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Pearl Harbor DVD Gift Set (Feature Film/ Beyond The Movie)

Pearl Harbor DVD Gift Set (Feature Film/ Beyond The Movie)

List Price: $49.99
Your Price: $44.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An Instant Classic, An Unforgettable Movie
Review: Pearl Harbor was the best movie that I have seen in a while. Ben Affleck does a great job as a pilot and so does Josh Hartnett. Kate Beckinsale is hotter than ever in this movie. When I first saw this movie when it first came out I thought it wasn't going to be all that good. But after the first 10 minutes I was already into the movie. This movie will pull you right into it and make you not want to leave. It is a drama, action, and has some humorous things in it. It is also a love story with a few surprises here and there. I didn't know too much about Pearl Harbor when I saw the movie but after this movie I learned a lot more and it made me want to learn a whole bunch about "The Day of Infamy". I recommend this movie to people of all ages. This movie will have you glued to the the screen and make you want to go see it again and again. And the picture quality and high defenition sound on the DVD will be awesome with Pearl Harbor. This movie is an Instant Classic, Two thumbs up, an Unforgettable movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: PEARL HARBOR GOT BOMBED AGAIN!THIS TIME BY AMERICANS
Review: I found something amazing about this movie, not the movie itself but the reviews of the movie. Just look at the reviews in the "Customer Review" column, every time when someone gave a good rating, he/she always got "0" support, one the other hand, when someone gave a bad rating he/she got vasty supports. I always thought Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii,U.S.A. not somewhere in Tokyo Bay or Death Star or wherever!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Soap Opera Passing as History
Review: This is yet another example of Hollywood distorting history with a tedious love story. I am a Pearl Harbor junkie because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on my fifth birthday. For this reason I will probably buy the video, but I don't recommend that anyone else do so. The actual bombing scenes are worth watching, but nothing else. A steaming pile of oduks (kudo spelled backwards) to all those who rated this turkey at four or five stars. The acting is mediocre and the plot is worse. Alec Baldwin once again shows that he can't act his way out of a paper bag.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Pearl Harbor
Review: This was one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: 2 hours would have been ok
Review: 3 hours? Come on they could have cutted off the horrible love triangle part of the movie and make a 2 hours movie. I'm sure that most people would prefer that.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: SNORA! SNORA! SNORA!
Review: What a disappointing movie! I was so looking foward to what I thought would be the exciting blockbuster of 2001. Instead I found Pearl Harbor to be boring, cheezy and very predictable. First of all it takes FOREVER for any sort of action to get started. My husband and I were sitting in the theater just waiting for the Japanese to start bombing Pearl Harbor, almost looking foward to it, so we could see something interesting happen on the screen. The romance between the two leads is Laugh out Loud ridiculous. The dialogue seems to be written by a 14 year old. I was actually reciting out loud what the characters would say next, it was that predictable. The story didnt let the audience become at all attached to the characters. The only reason I give it 2 stars was the great special effects. Dont waste your time on this dumbed down version of history. If you want to watch a great movie depicting history see 13 Days or Tora Tora Tora. Movies like that actually treat the audience like they have a brain.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Blew me away
Review: A great guy movie/chick-flick. Lots of action and great historical documentation!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bad
Review: This move is not as good as i thought it would be.
The special effects was really great but the actors and the stoy was a joke.
I came to se an great war movie but i was wrong.
When i saw this movie on the cinemas everybody in the audience started to laught when we saw the movie and acually gave the movie a thumb down for it.

Sorry about my english but im not an American or an English man. Im from Sweden so my English is not perfect.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: If you liked Titanic
Review: If you liked Titanic you'll probably enjoy this film... there's lots of action and some cheesey romance... It's entertaining but was definitely too long for the kind of movie it was... I was glad I saw it but I dont think I'd buy it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Date that will Live in Nostalgia
Review: 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.


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