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Pearl Harbor (Vista Series Director's Cut)

Pearl Harbor (Vista Series Director's Cut)

List Price: $39.99
Your Price: $35.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I was too critical
Review: In a previous review I just smashed this movie, frankly it deserved it. But I was just too critical of this film, Michael Bay put a great deal effort into making this film, but the ture story of Pearl Harbor was lost in the love story that never should of been written.

Ben and Hart portray two of the four American poliets that made it up into the air and that day. Now it's okay to do a historical fiction base around two of those pilotes, but adding a love triangel was the biggest mistake in moive history. Also the techical accuritcy of this movie is waaay off. And adding the Dolittle raid was totally pointless.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Entertaining
Review: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor provides the backdrop for a love triangle between a nurse & two best buddies.Although featuring some corny dialouge & clichès,it's still decent watching .The destruction of Pearl Harbor is spectacular to watch,with fireworks & explosions lasting about 40 minutes.The preformances are not bad at all,Voight does a great job playing FDR.Be sure to watch the film in widescreen.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The violin player on the Main Line
Review: This film is unbelively action and adventure packed! The movie takes place in Hawia and Japan,which are not in peace,but at war.America want to have peace but the Japanese empire want to over take theU.S.A.I think the actors still have thier skill and mind on the job.Its a highly amazing movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not the best, but still a very good movie
Review: I don't know why my many people are attacking this movie aggresively. We do see movies about a battle or a war. And we do see movies about a story (whether it is a real one or not). And this movie combines both. Myself I enjoyed the movie from the beginning to the end. And I'll definitely buy the DVD sooner or later. I strongly recommend the movie to everyone, but becareful, get something to eat and go the toilet before entering to the movie, its a long one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: one of the best film's ever made
Review: This dvd is gonna be bought from me the actual second it is released.Everything about it is really interesting, the documentaries about the real life event.For example the people that survived the uss arizona explosion or people who saw it and still live to talk about it.And also seeing actual footage about the 1941 event.The movie itself is amazing, and the action is just breathtaking and the special effects and the computer generated effects are mind boggling, especially when it's showing battleship row being attacked, the arizona explosion just blew me away when i saw it in the theatre like eight times.It's gonna be awesome and everybody should get it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Movie
Review: I watched the premier of this movie sitting near to three Pearl Harbor survivors who were being interviewed for their thoughts on it. I went up to one after it was over and he had tears in his eyes. It was a powerful movie and I felt for a moment as though I had actually been there. People say the love triangle in the film was trite. It did stretch things, but if you are a romantic like me, you'll not be bothered by it. How lifelike is Romeo and Juliet, considered a great classic? The characters in the movie are genuine. I really felt like I was looking at real people out of the 1940s. The battle scenes were really very good. The Japanese imagery of the "Divine Wind" was played up very effectively. I felt the sadness of the loss of fallen comrades. It was an interesting perspective to take the film from the bombing at Pearl Harbor to Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, but it made sense. All in all, a very enjoyable movie experience. And the Pearl Harbor vets approved too and that is no small feather in this movie's cap.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Twenty minutes of explosions, plus a day-time soap plot
Review: I don't mind dumb, and I especially like big dumb explosions, so I enjoyed about 20 minutes of this movie: the actual Pearl Harbour attack is great.

But to get there you sit through a wafer-thin love story: girl meets boy, boys seems to get killed, girl takes up with boy's best friend, then - surprise! - 1st boy turns out not to be dead. Though I don't know if anyone was surprised by that Shock Twist.

Before the Pearl Harbour attack an awful waste - I mean "waste" as in "vast empty desert" - of time occurs while three mannequins, two male, one female, each flatter than cardboard, read out unbelievably flat, cliched dialogue at each other. It probably only took up an hour or so of screen time, but in the theatre it felt like days.

Affleck, Beckinsale and Bay's acting is not ... outstandingly good or bad; the real problem is an absolute clunker of a script, dragging out the dull exposition of a plot nobody could reasonably care about. I wasn't the only one squirming with boredom until the Explosions Came.

When the Japanese airforce finally turn up, it's like the 5th Cavalry arriving to save the film. People have complained the film is anti-Japanese; actually it does make some effort to present the Japanese side (though not mentioning the unprovoked US navy shelling of Tokyo in the 19th century, which is not _entirely_ unrelated to the Japanese revenge some decades later).

But all seriousness aside, when the Japanese planes arrived it's a grand sight and it lifts the movie no end. People who've been sitting through the day-time sudser of a plot, to that point, could hardly be blamed if they wished that a couple of Zero pilots would get the main cast in their sights and ... I mean, the Japanese were aggressors, Hitler's allies, and did unspeakable things during the war, etc, but this film is so tedious that it actually had me cheering the Japanese on. So in its own way this US film helps the cause of international harmony. If not the cause of film-making.

Basically, there's enough special effects in this movie's three hours to make a really exciting rock video. But there's not much else. And for that video you'd still have to choose your own music. The film's own score is as flat and uninteresting as the script, even in the KA-BLAMM! sequence.

In short, this is another film where they put more thought into a single explosion than they put into the entire script. Eventually someone will notice that you can't make a flm that way: in the meantime the good news is that a screenwriter's strike wouldn't affect the production of films like this, one way or the other.

Cheers!

Laon

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The Most Overrated and Hollow Movie...Ever
Review: Pearl Harbor is a movie that strives to be an epic. It is shot in an epic manner and it is near three hours in length. It is directed by Michael Bay, the man responsible for such films as The Rock and Armageddon (both of which Jerry Bruckheimer also produced. Some pedigree, huh? This movie just doesn't know what to do. It tries to be a romantic comedy, and fails. It tries to be a romantic drama, but that fails too. It portrays the Pearl bombing fairly disturbingly (30 mins in a 3+ hour movie. Why was this movie called Pearl Harbor anyhow. It neither starts nor ends there?), even so, the megabucks special effects can't compare to the more subdued but more affecting effects on the true Pearl epic, Tora! Tora! Tora! Sure, the expectations are impossible, but this movie was hyped to be greater than the second coming.

I looked at some of the other reviews for this film and a majority of them were praise. One even called this a powerful movie. Manipulative maybe. Endearing? Not to me, this movie has one of the most predictable plots I have ever seen, some of the most hollow and unbelievable characters, and just a plain out lack of originality.

Even if you liked the film, you cannot tell me that this film was filled with all kinds of twists and turns. Who actually believed Rafe would die one hour into the movie? Ben Affleck is a hot commodity. Why would they voluntarily deprive him of screen time? And who didn't see the romance between his friend and girlfriend? Come on. The romantic comedy aspect is the most preposterous. The gags are visible a mile away. Some giggles, but no serious laughs here.

Archetypes and celebrity cameos pervade this concoction, and the results range from great to bad. Jon Voigt is the great performance, he literally becomes FDR. I didn't even know who it was until I read the paper. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a Navy Cook, and he has approximately 5 min of time on screen, but he is good in those minutes. It is kind of a flashback to his earlier performance in Men of Honor. Dan Aykroyd is nearly unrecognizable as a Naval Inteligence Analyst who thinks the Japanese will attack at Pearl. He is on for about a minute. These short cameos evoke memories of A Bridge too Far or The Longest Day, but both of those movies had good writing and fine acting from the leads. There's the next problem. Ben Affleck's best performance to date was as Will's friend Chucky in Good Will Hunting, in which he was funny and serious at the same time. Armageddon was a dud, I haven't seen Bounce but it looks like Paltrow and Affleck are a better couple than Breckinridge and Affleck. Which brings me to my next point. Although Kate Breckinridge is a very attractive woman and a fine actress, there is no chemistry between her and Affleck. Josh Hartnett, however, is hard to tell. On one hand, his performance is more convincing than Affleck's. On the other hand, we know less about him. He steals some scenes.

The final gripe is that this movie borrows from old war movies, romance novels, etc., that it really has nothing to call its own. Every old cliche is dragged out. None is left out. Rafe is a hero who can do no wrong, Josh Hartnett is his pushover friend, Evelyn is the girl, and can't the love triangle just die already? You'd think that a plot device as old as film itself might eventually go away, but no.

This film is emotionally affecting, and after you watch it some of the lines will be stuck in your head. But that is just because of slick filmmaking and the delivery of the lines. The dialogue is mediocre most of the time. Oh, and Alec Baldwin is good as the bomber colonel. Like many modern "epics", namely The Postman, this movie is not only boring, but trite, boring, unintelligent, boring, long, and boring. If you are really interested in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, pick up the Special Edition of Tora! Tora! Tora!, now on DVD. Leave this to rot in bargain bins once people realize there is no substance here.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: THE BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME, YOU HAVE GOT 2 C IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: NEED I SAY MORE, I CRIED SO MUCH I DIDN'T THINK I COULD CRY ANYMORE, BUT GUESS WHAT I STILL CRY WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE MOVIE. I WENT INTO THE MOVIE THEATRE TO SEE THIS MOVIE THINKING I WAS GONNA BE BORED. BUT GUESS WHAT I WAS WRONG IT WAS THE BEST MOVIE I HAD EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. THEIR WERE SO MANY SURPRISES ALONG THE WAY, AND THE ENDING IS THE BIGGEST OF THEM ALL. JOSH HARTNETT, AND BEN AFFLECK ARE GREAT IN THIS MOVIE! BOTH ARE VERY, VERY, VERY SEXY. AGAIN NEED I GIVE YOU ANY MORE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD SEE THIS GREAT MOVIE. I WOULD HOPE NOT! SO GO BUY IT WHEN IT COMES OUT, OR EVEN RENT IT. BUT TRUST ME IT IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER...

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: First Half = 1 Star, Second Half = 5 Stars
Review: The first 90 minutes of Pearl Harbor is an irritating attempt to recapture the same kind of audience of adolescent girls who propelled Titanic to becoming the highest-grossing film of all-time. The last 90 minutes is almost pure action. The great thing about a DVD is you can skip over the fluff and tune in where the Japanese pilots prepare to climb into their planes. Building up the suspense of the impending attack, as wave after wave of aircraft launch from the decks of their carriers and head toward Battleship Row, is extremely well done. The heroics of the main characters are a little hokey, particularly in a battle everybody already knows is lost, but you root for them anyway our of sheer patriotism. The special effects are impeccable.


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