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"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.

The filmmakers seem to have aimed the film at an audience that may not have heard of Pearl Harbor, or perhaps even of World War Two. This is the Our Weekly Reader version. If you have the slightest knowledge of the events in the film, you will know more than it can tell you. There is no sense of history, strategy or context; according to this movie, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because America cut off its oil supply, and they were down to an 18 month reserve. Would going to war restore the fuel sources? Did they perhaps also have imperialist designs? Movie doesn't say.

So shaky is the film's history that at the end, when Jimmy Doolittle's Tokyo raiders crash-land in China, they're shot at by Japanese patrols with only a murky throwaway explanation about the Sino-Japanese war already underway. I predict some viewers will leave the theater sincerely confused about why there were Japanese in China.

As for the movie's portrait of the Japanese themselves, it is so oblique that Japanese audiences will find little to complain about apart from the fact that they play such a small role in their own raid. There are several scenes where the Japanese high command debates military tactics, but all of their dialog is strictly expository; they state facts but do not emerge with personalities or passions. Only Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) is seen as an individual, and his dialog seems to have been singled out with the hindsight of history. Congratulated on a brilliant raid, he demurs, "A brilliant man would find a way not to fight a war." And later, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant." Do you imagine at any point the Japanese high command engaged in the 1941 Japanese equivalent of exchanging high-fives and shouting "Yes!" while pumping their fists in the air? Not in this movie, where the Japanese seem to have been melancholy even at the time about the regrettable need to play such a negative role in such a positive Hollywood film.

The American side of the story centers on two childhood friends from Tennessee with the standard-issue screenplay names Rafe McCawley ( Ben Affleck ) and Danny Walker ( Josh Hartnett ). They enter the Army Air Corps and both fall in love with the same nurse, Evelyn Johnson ( Kate Beckinsale )--first Rafe falls for her, and then, after he is reported dead, Danny. Their first date is subtitled "Three Months Later" and ends with Danny, having apparently read the subtitle, telling Evelyn, "Don't let it be three months before I see you again, okay?" That gets almost as big a laugh as her line to Rafe, "I'm gonna give Danny my whole heart, but I don't think I'll ever look at another sunset without thinking of you." That kind of bad laugh would have been sidestepped in a more literate screenplay, but our hopes are not high after an early newsreel report that the Germans are bombing "downtown London"--a difficult target, since although there is such a place as "central London," at no time in 2,000 years has London ever had anything described by anybody as a "downtown." There is not a shred of conviction or chemistry in the love triangle, which results after Rafe returns alive to Hawaii shortly before the raid on Pearl Harbor and is angry at Evelyn for falling in love with Danny, inspiring her timeless line, "I didn't even know until the day you turned up alive--and then all this happened." Evelyn is a hero in the aftermath of the raid, performing triage by using her lipstick to separate the wounded who should be treated from those left to die. In a pointless stylistic choice, director Michael Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman shoot some of the hospital scenes in soft focus, some in sharp focus, some blurred. Why? I understand it's to obscure details deemed too gory for the PG-13 rating. (Why should the carnage at Pearl Harbor be toned down to PG-13 in the first place?) In the newsreel sequences, the movie fades in and out of black and white with almost amusing haste, while the newsreel announcer sounds not like a period voice but like a Top-40 deejay in an echo chamber.

The most involving material in the film comes at the end, when Jimmy Doolittle ( Alec Baldwin ) leads his famous raid on Tokyo, flying Army bombers off the decks of Navy carriers and hoping to crash-land in China.

He and his men were heroes, and their story would make a good movie (and indeed has: "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"). Another hero in the movie is the African-American cook Dorie Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who because of his race was not allowed to touch a gun in the racist pre-war Navy, but opens fire during the raid, shoots down two planes, and saves the life of his captain. He's shown getting a medal. Nice to see an African-American in the movie, but the almost total absence of Asians in 1941 Hawaii is inexplicable.

As for the raid itself, a little goes a long way. What is the point, really, of more than half an hour of planes bombing ships, of explosions and fireballs, of roars on the soundtrack and bodies flying through the air and people running away from fighters that are strafing them? How can it be entertaining or moving when it's simply about the most appalling slaughter? Why do the filmmakers think we want to see this, unrelieved by intelligence, viewpoint or insight? It was a terrible, terrible day. Three thousand died in all. This is not a movie about them.

It is an unremarkable action movie; Pearl Harbor supplies the subject, but not the inspiration.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Rated PG-13 For Sustained Intense War Sequences, Images Of Wounded, Brief Sensuality and Some Language

183 minutes

Ben Affleck as Rafe McCawley

Josh Hartnett as Danny Walker

Kate Beckinsale as Evelyn

Alec Baldwin as Doolittle

Cuba Gooding Jr. as Dorie Miller

Jon Voigt as President Roosevelt

Directed by

Michael Bay
Randall Wallace

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; War Is Hell, but Very Pretty

By A. O. Scott

May 25, 2001

The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is ''From Here to Eternity.''

''Pearl Harbor,'' the noisy, expensive and very long new blockbuster from Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, steals an occasional glance in the direction of ''Eternity,'' Fred Zinnemann's durable 1953 melodrama, adapted from James Jones's sprawling best seller. A couple smooches in front of pounding Pacific surf, though they don't actually roll around in it, as did Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Military police officers break up a barroom fight. And since the movie is in ripe, lustrous color, the sun dresses and Hawaiian shirts look just fabulous. But ''Pearl Harbor'' has as little interest in character as it does, ultimately, in history.

For all its epic pretensions (as if epic were a matter of running time, tumescent music and earnest voice-over pronouncements), the movie works best as a bang-and-boom action picture, a loud symphony of bombardment and explosion juiced up with frantic editing and shiny computer-generated imagery. When Jon Voight appears as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his face bloated with several pounds of prosthetic latex (and his voice burnished into a patrician drawl), you half expect one of those inevitable action-thriller unmaskings, in which he peels off the rubber, climbs out of the wheelchair and reveals himself to be Steven Seagal ready to lay a smackdown on the treacherous Japanese. The film's reported budget was $135 million, which breaks down to roughly $45 million an hour.

The bulk of the money seems to have been spent -- and not too badly spent, as these things go -- on the long sequence devoted to the attack itself. The appearance of Japanese bombers buzzing in formation through the bright morning sunshine as housewives tend their clotheslines and children frolic on ball fields is meant to convey dread and impending menace.

But after an hour of absurd, lump-in-the-throat romanticism, the arrival of the enemy comes as something of a relief. The crashing of bombs and the whine of bullets at least pushes Hans Zimmer's oppressive score into the background, and, in a further service to humanity, quiets the thundering bombast of Randall Wallace's dialogue.

Nearly every line of the script drops from the actors' mouths with the leaden clank of exposition, timed with bad sitcom beats. According to the time-tested Bruckheimer formula, each heartfelt utterance must be soothed by a little joke; a moment of light-heartedness must resolve into a muffled choke of pathos. No shot seems to last more than five seconds, no scene more than a minute. People say only what is directly relevant to the movie's themes: ''If there are many more back home like you,'' a British officer tells one of the heroes, ''God help anyone who goes to war with America.''

The upstanding Yank tells him a bit later: ''We're not anxious to die. Just anxious to matter.''

The main narrative concerns two boyhood chums, Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker, who after a brief boyhood idyll in Tennessee grow into dashing flyboys played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. Rafe is reckless and gallant, Danny a bit more shy. In 1941 they find themselves in a company of easily distinguished war-movie types: the stutterer, the would-be Lothario, the dumb guy and so on. (In earlier, less self-conscious times, they would also have been sorted by ethnic and regional background.) Their commander is Col. James Doolittle, one of a handful of real historical figures in the movie, played -- with a local news anchor's stentorian growl -- by Alec Baldwin, who seems ready to devour whatever matériel is left unscathed by the enemy's bombs.

The fliers soon meet their female counterparts, a gaggle of nurses similarly typed for easy recognition: the fat one, the boy-crazy blonde, the shy girl with glasses and so on. One of these, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), falls in love with Rafe after they meet cute during a physical exam. Suffering from what sounds like dyslexia, he is unable to sort out the letters on the eye chart, but after hearing his eloquent paean to his own flying skills, she passes him. (Curiously, his disability does not interfere with his ability to read and write love letters once he and Evelyn are separated by the war.)

She also jabs him in the rear end with an inoculation needle, and he passes out and breaks his nose, which sets up the following priceless exchange: He: ''You are so beautiful it hurts.'' She: ''It's your nose that hurts.'' He: ''No, it's my heart.'' (Me: ''No, it's my stomach.'')

Mr. Affleck and Ms. Beckinsale do what they can with their lines, and glow with the satiny shine of real movie stars. Mr. Hartnett's anxious inwardness plays effectively against Mr. Affleck's frat-boy bravado, and a few supporting players, notably James King, Dan Aykroyd and Tom Sizemore, are permitted a few seconds of real acting. But the script, and Mr. Bay's impatient direction, do not give anyone sufficient time or space to develop shadings of character. Instead of a story, the film provides data, telling you what it should show, suggest or leave implicit. Evelyn falsifies the eye exam because, she explains, her father was a pilot, too. Young Danny's father's mistreatment of his son is a result of trauma suffered in World War I.

One of the heroes -- critical courtesy forbids me from saying which one -- is shot down by the Luftwaffe over the English Channel during the Blitz and declared dead. Later he shows up in Hawaii (this will be a surprise only if you believe that a top-billed actor can die 45 minutes into a movie like this) and explains that he was trapped in Nazi-occupied France and somehow escaped. That sounds like an interesting story, but the film is too busy with the ludicrous triangle that develops among Rafe, Danny and Evelyn to tell it.

And it's also too busy to do much with Cuba Gooding Jr., who plays Dorie Miller, a real-life cook aboard the U.S.S. Arizona whose valor during the attack made him the first African-American to receive the Navy Cross. Miller's story is boiled down to about a half-dozen short scenes: he wins a boxing match, discusses manhood with Evelyn, receives a compliment from his commanding officer, cradles the injured officer in his arms and shoots down a plane. After Mr. Gooding's appearance in ''Men of Honor,'' his role here feels like a step backward into a tokenism one might have thought obsolete. The Dorie Miller subplot smacks of demographic base covering and self-congratulatory bad faith.

''Pearl Harbor'' is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy. The United States military in 1941 was apparently a smoke-free (and virtually sex-free) environment. Even the Chesterfield-loving F. D. R. is never shown lighting up. Racism in the military is mentioned, but neither witnessed nor explored. On a more encouraging note, while the term Jap is uttered from time to time, some effort has been made to acknowledge the humanity of the adversaries. Not too much, though. The film's narrative arc, demanding a trimphant ending, concludes with Colonel Doolittle leading Rafe and Danny on a bombing raid whose targets include Tokyo, and which, in contrast to the Pearl Harbor attack, is viewed entirely from the perspective of the bombers.

But when it leaves its big themes and silly story on the ground, ''Pearl Harbor'' is something of a tour de force. The aerial combat is thrillingly executed, and Mr. Bay has clearly mastered some tricky war-picture techniques, managing to convey disorder and mayhem on a large scale while maintaining a coherent sense of space and geography. The four editors listed in the credits have clearly earned their combat pay, and the director of photography, John Schwartzman, juggles film stocks, lenses and color treatments to create a collage of destruction at once disorienting and viscerally effective.

But as in other Bruckheimer-Bay collaborations (''The Rock,'' ''Armageddon''), the violence has no emotional resonance. We see bodies tossed in the air by explosions, maimed sailors and dying soldiers, but the horror of death in wartime registers only intermittently, as when the sailors trapped inside the hull of the Arizona reach above the surface to touch the hands of the men trying, in vain, to rescue them.

You emerge from ''Pearl Harbor'' numbed and dazzled, but not especially moved or enlightened. It is not a terrible movie, but rather a defiantly, extravagantly average one. May 25, 2001, is hardly a date that will live in infamy. The Allied leader to paraphrase is not Roosevelt, but Churchill: never have so many spent so much on so little.

''Pearl Harbor'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some mild swearing, a gauzy sex scene and many scenes of intense and brutal combat.

PEARL HARBOR

Directed by Michael Bay; written by Randall Wallace; director of photography, John Schwartzman; edited by Chris Lebenzon, Steven Rosenblum, Mark Goldblatt and Roger Barton; music by Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nigel Phelps; produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Mr. Bay; released by Touchstone Pictures. Running time: 183 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Ben Affleck (Rafe McCawley), Josh Hartnett (Danny Walker), Kate Beckinsale (Evelyn Johnson), William Lee Scott (Billy), Greg Zola (Anthony R. Fusco), Ewen Bremner (Red), Alec Baldwin (Col. James Doolittle), James King (Betty), Catherine Kellner (Barbara), Jennifer Garner (Sandra), Jon Voight (President Franklin D. Roosevelt), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Dorie Miller), Mako (Admiral Yamamoto), Colm Feore (Admiral Kimmel), Dan Aykroyd (Captain Thurman), William Fichtner (Danny's Father) and Tom Sizemore (Earl).

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Pearl Harbor Reviews

'Pearl Harbor' effortlessly self-parodies itself. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 22, 2022

Although Pearl Harbor will fill Disney's coffers, it will fail to fill your heart or adequately honor those men and women who were Pearl Harbor.

Full Review | Nov 14, 2019

... sensationalizing real events for a meaningless film, then coasting on a huge budget and advertising to lure in moviegoers thinking they'll see historic accuracy and drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 11, 2019

...a typically bloated Michael Bay production that squanders its few positive attributes over the course of a ludicrously padded-out running time...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 12, 2016

A tepid, wannabe-Titanic love story, under the stewardship of a man whose career has ranged from the emotional depth of an 11-year-old boy all the way up to a 13-year-old boy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/10 | Jan 2, 2016

Pearl Harbor is a blockheaded, hollow-hearted industrial enterprise.

Full Review | May 28, 2014

As impressive as the physical verisimilitude is, it only accentuates the contrast with the banalities of a script that lacks any fully developed characters.

The best way to see the movie is as I did: expecting nothing and being pleasantly surprised, and strangely moved, by Mr. Bay's audacity in filming his lovers in end-of-the-world close-ups, however briefly.

The effect of watching a Michael Bay film is indistinguishable from having a large, pointy lump of rock drop on your head. His new picture, Pearl Harbor, maintains the mood.

Pearl Harbor is a bomb, make no mistake. But the movie is such a noisy, persistent bomb that it is guaranteed to draw a crowd.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 27, 2014

For all the 118 actors listed, the movie offers almost no sense of authentic humanity. The faces the filmmakers plaster on their characters are as flat and stereotyped as those on war-recruitment posters.

Full Review | May 27, 2014

Leave it to Bay and Bruckheimer to reduce one of America's biggest military tragedies into a three-hour avalanche of Kodak moments, and one of America's defining crises into a facile exercise in fake uplift.

Three hours and three minutes of guff and goo about the nobility of killing and/or being killed for arbitrary reasons.

There's no dismissing the film, if only because it offers another long, loud example of how Hollywood remains the hagiographic spinmeister of American war history.

The centerpiece is the attack. For 50 minutes, the filmmakers unleash nonstop eye candy.

Bloated and boring, Pearl Harbor is a collection of war-movie clichés.

Bay seems temperamentally incapable of holding a shot for much more than five seconds.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 27, 2014

Weaknesses of plot and characterisation are only amplified by the film's unwieldy size and patriotic portent, and the script is toe-curlingly bad.

While the film manages to drag the actual attack out to 45 minutes of its ponderous 183 minute running time, that still leaves a lot of movie to be taken up by what passes for plot -- a convoluted romance of the heavily cliched kind.

This is so bad, it's good. This is a real disaster.

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‘pearl harbor’: thr’s 2001 review.

Timed to Memorial Day in 2001, Michael Bay unleashed a historical epic aimed to conquer the box office. Pearl Harbor, starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale, debuted to negative reviews but topped the holiday weekend chart, eventually raking in nearly $450 million worldwide. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below: Theater owners, start your popcorn […]

By David Hunter

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Theater owners, start your popcorn machines. Despite a filmmaking sensibility that will deeply divide audiences — and inflame more than a few critics — Disney’s Pearl Harbor nonetheless has the spectacle and subject matter to pull in general audiences for weeks. Stiff competition later in its run, however, will keep it from making a run for the record books.

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Pearl harbor.

60 New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky It's war porn, a movie that revels in the carnage.
50 Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy It's a Ritalin-deprived sensibility, but it keeps you skating over the dull spots, in which the film unfortunately is rich.
50 Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov A crowd-pleasing blockbuster if ever there was one, features as its centerpiece a jaw-droppingly vivid re-creation of the Japanese attack on the U.S.'s fabled (and extremely vulnerable, as it turned out) Pacific fleet.
50 Salon Stephanie Zacharek Salon Stephanie Zacharek "Pearl Harbor" is exactly the kind of prestige project you'd expect from a director like Bay, hitting all its targets with plodding precision and never once achieving surprise.
50 TV Guide Magazine Maitland McDonagh TV Guide Magazine Maitland McDonagh Clearly, neither screenwriter Randall Wallace nor director Michael Bay ever met a cliche he didn't embrace.
50 New York Magazine (Vulture) Peter Rainer New York Magazine (Vulture) Peter Rainer For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.
40 Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum If you decide to hit the concessions stand (where you're bound to have lots of company), I'd suggest going out for popcorn during either the first hour or the third, because the second features some pretty good big-screen effects involving planes, ships, and explosions.
40 Village Voice J. Hoberman Village Voice J. Hoberman The chaos is convincing, but, less ruthless than Steven Spielberg, Bay eschews D-day panic and mutilation.
25 Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt Fiction and fantasy to evade reflection on the world we actually live in.
25 Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow A brain-dead buddy-movie tearjerker with semi-tasteful romance and tasteful gore mixed in with the derring-do.
See all 35 reviews on Metacritic.com
See all external reviews for Pearl Harbor

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Pearl Harbor Review

01 Jun 2001

183 minutes

Pearl Harbor

'War", as someone once trilled, "what is it good for?" Well, bloody huge summer blockbusters, apparently. At least, that's what scourge of the arthouse crowd and best bud of the multiplex mob, Jerry Bruckheimer, was betting when he decided to plough $135 million of Disney's money into Pearl Harbor.

A risky proposition when you realise that it's not only a story about the invincible American military being caught with its pants down but has a cast, that while not by any means likely to turn up on Lily Savage's Blankety Blank in a hurry, are certainly no guarantee of financial success. The question, then, is, have Bruckheimer and his buddy Michael Bay (Armageddon) pulled it off?

The answer is that, as usual, the Bruckheimer brand has delivered an almost dead-cert hit. Whilst a bit on the anorexic side in the dramatic weight department, it's a natural born blockbuster that amply excuses its slightly soggy beginning and cut and shunt end with a centre-piece attack sequence that ratchets the action bar up dozens of notches and represents the final coming of age of CGI. Quite simply, you have never seen anything like it.

Story-wise best pal flying aces Affleck and Hartnett row over the affections of Kate Beckinsale, after she accidentally shags the latter when the former is supposed to have been shot down over Europe. It's a slightly soapy plot-line, not aided by Bay's determination to shoot everything by what appears to be a permanent sunset (and a pleasing sense of humour from Affleck vanishes far too quickly).

Bay's pre-war America looks like it emerged from a beer ad - little boys fly soapbox Sopwiths, while real-life biplanes zoom over amber waves of grain. But it's the bombing itself that was always what this movie was going to live and die on, and here Bay really delivers, from an astonishing first 'bomb's eye view' shot that sees the camera follow a falling munition through the decks of the USS Arizona. Then comes the perfectly timed detonation, using fantastically detailed long shots of hundreds of Japanese Zeroes buzzing around the exploding fleet.

It's an amazing, visceral experience. ILM's CGI is, for the first time, indistinguishable from reality. Torpedoes hiss under the thrashing feet of drowning soldiers, men are blown through upturned ship's propellers towards the camera, and fighters plough into each other. It's an astounding, nerve-shredding experience that leaves the mealy-mouthed whinings about flat-packed characterisation bobbing in the wreckage.

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Review of Pearl Harbor

It's hard to hate Pearl Harbor – the film's efforts to endear itself to audiences are quite admirable, and cinematographer John Schwartzman ( The Rock , Armageddon ) captures his images with an astounding, razor-sharp, deeply-hued, picture postcard perfection (thanks, in no small part, to his use of a good, old-fashioned three-strip Technicolor process ). But, as hard as it tries¿and as desperately as it wants you to believe in its tissue-thin "story and characters"¿ PH never engages. From the get-go, PH is spiritually and conceptually bankrupt, leaving audiences with a lot of pretty pictures, and waiting for things to explode.

And when they do blow-up? It's mighty cool to watch. Industrial Light & Magic , which has taken more than a few bruises in previous IGN FilmForce reviews , here achieves near (but not complete) photo-realism with their effects. Discerning eyes will still be able to detect some tell-tale "I'm Digital!" giveaways. But, unlike many of their recent endeavors ( The Mummy Returns ), their FX here are frequently indistinguishable from "the real thing" – a significant (and long overdue) achievement. This despite the fact PH 's FX frequently do not address simple & inescapable laws of physics – pertaining to airplane maneuvers, ship buoyancy, etc. If you get bored, try to catch some faux pauxs¿

Pleasantly enough, these effects remain remarkably consistent throughout the film, but during PH 's finale, someone dropped the ball. It's probably not ILM's fault – the quality of their effects is still high during the movie's climactic bombing of Tokyo by American flyboys (this really happened, although most people don't realize it). But there aren't enough effects, and the dynamics of the effects feel significantly different than earlier in the film. Thus, sequences which should have seemed tantamount to Star Wars: A New Hope 's attack on the Death Star feel jarringly traditional, and disappointingly minimalist.

Maybe the production was running out of money, or maybe they were running out of time. Either way, the "big finale" (which Disney wanted removed from the script before shooting, by the way) is very much a fizzle. For all the technological whizbangery at the filmmakers' disposal, Pearl Harbor 's climactic moments (following real-life American superpilot Jimmy Dolittle on a low-altitude mission over Tokyo – the heart of enemy territory) is easily bested by Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , a film which won a ¿Best Effects¿ Oscar back in 1945. Something's not right, here¿

But the finale isn't the only place where something isn't "right". Other than the totally uninvolving (and somewhat sleazy) relationship between Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale...and Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett...and the film's remarkably lackluster conclusion, there's a bizarre sense of disingenuousness & "so what?" flowing through Pearl Harbor . It's in the performances, it's in the direction, and it's in Hans Zimmer's score. PH feels like everyone involved couldn't get a bead on the project's emotional core, so they overcompensate & try to make us believe they believe in what they're doing.

So much so that the final scene of the movie features narration by Beckinsale (there had previously been no narration in the movie, although there were a few voiceovers of people reading sappy letters to each other) telling us why Pearl Harbor & the subsequent Dolittle Raid were significant. If the film had been made properly beforehand and the script had been tuned correctly to begin with, we wouldn't need a voiceover by one of the leads trying to convince us that the three-hour movie we just saw mattered – and the events it just portrayed meant something. Because the film would have spoken for itself, and we'd already know.

Which is perhaps Pearl Harbor 's ultimate downfall – it doesn't have a voice. It doesn't have a voice because someone didn't bother to give it one (eyes roll towards Machiavellian producer Jerry Bruckheimer and executive producer/screenwriter Randall Wallace, who also wrote Braveheart ). One way to give a film a "voice" is to give it meat – substance – elements which compell viewers to want more, or lend resonance to the material on-screen. One way this might have been accomplished in this instance is, perhaps, the simplest way of all: look to reality. Real history is sometimes more interesting than anything the most creative minds could hope to fabricate.

** Many Japanese people were not too thrilled about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Originally, the United States government was supposed to have been given (around) thirty minutes warning before the attack occurred. This was in accordance with a Samurai code of ethics (still being used by the Japanese military at the time) stating that¿if you're going to attack a sleeping opponent¿at least wake-up your opponent & give him a chance to get to his sword before fighting. For a variety of reasons, the U.S. didn't receive notification before the attack. Thus, Japanese pilots¿who thought they were attacking a prepared opponent at Pearl¿actually found themselves perpetrating a "sneak attack" on (literally) sleeping Americans (the attack was very early in the morning). Many Japanese flyers found no victory in this whatsoever, some of them later considered such an attack dishonorable. This might have brought the film an awesome and surprising twist, as many viewers are unaware of Japanese perspectives on this matter. The film could have done its harbor attack sequences¿had the Japanese flyers returning to their aircraft carriers amid cheers, etc¿. then learn what they'd done & had this emotional victory pulled out from under them (the Japanese pilots may have actually learned about this lack-of-forewarning a bit later, but at least the dynamics would have been "realistic" & in-place). Not only is such a sequence missing, this film (literally) has a Japanese Admiral gloating about being able to "sneak-up" on us – something which flies in the face of all that is mentioned above. ** Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto – mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor – had grave reservations about attacking America. Many of his counterparts were considerably more gung-ho and jingoistic than Yamamoto, because they lacked his unique perspective on our nation and culture. Yamamoto had spent 2 years in the States, and was educated at Harvard. He knew how Americans lived and he knew how we thought. He knew exactly what it meant to attack the United States, and he didn't like the ramifications he foresaw. Thus, when he personally radioed move-out orders to the Japanese attack fleet (under the code "Climb Mount Nitaka"), he probably did so with some hesitance, knowing full-well he was opening a whopping-big can of worms. But he was forced to move forward by insurmountable political and economic pressures. This code-phrase being radioed is not in the movie, despite the film's tracking of many months of Japanese shenanigans leading-up to the attack. Seeing the difficulty this brilliant man faced when radioing such a message would have said much about the human nature of the event, and spoken volumes about emotion and tension behind the incident. Which brings us to: ** Pearl Harbor indicates the Japanese attack the United States in retaliation for the U.S. embargoing oil, etc. – which was quickly & significantly hurting the Japanese nation. What the film doesn't mention is that this embargo was actually the United States' effort to slow-down (or reverse) an enormously destructive Japanese incursion into China (see Spielberg's Empire of the Sun for a taste of this – the film is about the Japanese invasion of China). So, yes, we embargoed iron and oil from the Japanese¿and this pissed them off and made them bite back (even though they were already considering attacking us)¿but our embargo was for good reason. If the film addresses this anywhere (I'm pretty sure it doesn't), I musta missed it. In other words, in trying to "do the right thing", the United States invited this retaliation. Lends some irony to the proceedings... ** In January 1941, Joseph Grew – the United States' ambassador to Japan – overheard talk of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while at a cocktail party. Grew and Army/Navy officials in Washington D.C. summarily dismissed this talk. This event is never mentioned in the film, even though one of the movie's date/setting superimposition specifies a sequence being set in¿you guessed it¿January, 1941.

Producer Bruckheimer has recently been running around talking about how PH is designed to be entertainment, first and foremost. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with entertaining audiences. And as schlocky as some of his films can be, the man has turned fluffy, slick entertainment into an artform. But dealing with history¿especially history so recent that some people who lived it are still alive¿brings with it a certain weight and responsibility. Doesn't mean it can't be fun, just means there should have been some greater impulse towards accuracy. If not accuracy, at least substance.

But Pearl Harbor doesn't fare well on the accuracy meter. It doesn't fare well on the entertainment meter, and it doesn't fare well on the substance meter. Its smarmy, Springer-esque love story (which really feels like the set-up for a porn movie – all it needed was Beckinsale saying "I can't decided which one of you I want to sleep with, so I'll sleep with you both !") isn't likely to evoke too many "aaaawwwwwwssssss" from love-struck girls. In fact, its "two best friends doing the same girl" motif is likely to repulse a significant portion of its dude audience.

Bruckheimer and Bay set out to make a war movie (a la Saving Private Ryan ) – a vision which was compromised when Disney execs force-fed a "romance" into the movie (Disney wanted its own Titanic ). Bay's subsequent tussles with Disney nearly resulted in his leaving the project on several occasions. Even if Disney had stayed out of their way, I'm still not sure Wonder Twins Jerry & Michael would have/could have pulled this off. As stated above, even an action/war movie needs substance ( SPR had substance – and still managed a nervewracking quantity of explosions and bloodshed), and substance doesn't seem to be what these filmmakers were about this time around.

If you want a good Bruckheimer/Bay action drama, see The Rock – it's probably one of the best action films you'll come across in quite some time. It can even be stirring and exhilarating at times, something Pearl Harbor never is. If you're hungry for a good Pearl Harbor flick, watch Tora! Tora! Tora! – which just got a kick-ass THX DVD re-issue from Fox Home Video. The film is co-directed by Richard Fleischer ( Soylent Green , Fantastic Voyage ) and Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku.

Or, watch The Final Countdown – which sends a modern nuclear aircraft carrier back in time to the day before the attack on Pearl, presenting its crew with the opportunity to change history (and the crew actually slows down to work through the ramifications of doing so). Sure, it's science fiction, but it's got Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and Charles Durning – and it comes out on DVD later this year. Ironically, despite its fantastic subject matter, the film conveys the weight and significance of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor in a more adept and entertaining way than this new film does. It doesn't need to tell us why we should care, because its story and writing make us care.

The Final Countdown even makes reference to "Climb Mount Nitaka!" – imagine that. It doesn't take much¿and it's not all that hard¿to get it right.

– Glen would look dopier-than-usual in a Hula shirt...

For tons of information about the actual Pearl Harbor event (including a searchable archive of survivor's stories), CLICK HERE to jump to National Geographic's "Remembering Pearl Harbor" site. CLICK HERE for information about an amazing History Channel documentary (now available on DVD) – which features Pearl Harbor survivor accounts from both Japanese pilots and American personnel (and some rather fascinating footage).The official Pearl Harbor website can be accessed HERE .

1.5 out of 5 Stars, 3/10 Score

Review of <I>Pearl Harbor</I>

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Pearl harbor, common sense media reviewers.

Violent war story mixed with soapy love triangle.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Both sides of the Pearl Harbor attack are shown; c

The pilots at Pearl Harbor who later flew in the D

Intense battle scenes, many injuries and deaths, s

Some innuendo between female nurses and male pilot

Occasional profanity: "son of a bitch,"

Soldiers drunk at a bar. An exchange of words betw

Positive Messages

Both sides of the Pearl Harbor attack are shown; care is taken to show the Japanese motives for launching the surprise attack. All the patriotic heartstrings are pulled with every trick in the Hollywood playbook, but what emerges is a strong sense of the people who fought at Pearl Harbor and in World War II, their bravery in defending America from fascism, making the event come to life from the pages of history.

Positive Role Models

The pilots at Pearl Harbor who later flew in the Doolittle raid that surprised Japan and restored morale to an America devastated by the losses at Pearl Harbor are shown to be brave and selfless in the interests of defending their country. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is shown to be a commanding and decisive leader, demanding more than what the military brass say is possible in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. Tells the story of the first African-American man to earn the Naval Cross.

Violence & Scariness

Intense battle scenes, many injuries and deaths, some graphic. Sailors on battleships shown drowning, burning, falling off the ships as they capsize and sink. Plane crashes. Hospital blood, intense injuries -- a nurse places her fingers into the neck wound of a man profusely bleeding. Gunfights between American and Japanese soldiers, grenades thrown. A disheveled farmer hits his son and knocks him to the ground; the boy's best friend strikes the farmer with a two-by-four.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Some innuendo between female nurses and male pilots. Nonsexual male nudity when nurses give shots in the buttocks in the infirmary. A couple decides not to have sex because they don't want to have any regrets. Another couple does have sex, and the woman becomes pregnant.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional profanity: "son of a bitch," "bulls--t," "t-tties," "damn," "piss," "crap." A Japanese-American doctor is called a "Jap" by a racist white soldier. Some sexual innuendo between male sailors and female nurses.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Soldiers drunk at a bar. An exchange of words between a drunk naval pilot with his best friend turns into a violent bar fight, punches thrown, tables and chairs thrown and knocked over, glass breaking. They are shown the next morning in a car passed out, waking up hungover. Champagne, whisky, sake drinking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Pearl Harbor is a three-hour Michael Bay war movie about the surprise attack that led to America's entrance into World War II. The movie features extended and intense battle violence with thousands of casualties, including characters we care about. Soldiers use profanity ("son of a bitch," "bulls--t," "t-tties," "damn") and joke about seduction techniques. A couple decides not to have sex because they don't want to have any regrets. Another couple does have sex, and the woman becomes pregnant. There is some drinking and drunkenness. Cuba Gooding, Jr. plays a real-life hero of World War II, the first black man to win the Navy Cross. It's worth mentioning that the movie attempts to show Japan not just as "the enemy," but also as soldiers and leaders who had families and loved ones who were somewhat ambivalent about launching the attack. In one scene, an injured American soldier yells that he doesn't want to be treated by a "Jap" -- his prejudice the smallest hint of the Japanese-American internment camps that, for all the heroism and sacrifice in so many other ways, would be one of the most shameful aspects of American involvement in World War II. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (13)
Kids say (47)

Based on 13 parent reviews

Why are people shocked that this is inappropriate for children?

Intense war story’s silly love triangle takes over., what's the story.

PEARL HARBOR begins as America is sending equipment and supplies to Europe, but has not yet entered World War II. Friends Rafe ( Ben Affleck ) and Danny ( Josh Hartnett ) are army pilots. Anxious to get some action, Rafe volunteers to go to England, where he can join an American division of the RAF. Before he leaves, he meets a pretty nurse named Evelyn ( Kate Beckinsale ), and they fall in love. He leaves for England, and Danny and Evelyn are assigned half a world away, to the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor. When Rafe is reported killed, Evelyn and Danny are devastated. They comfort each other, and become involved. Rafe arrives to find them together, just before the Japanese attack. That attack, lasting just about as long on-screen as it did in reality, is devastating to the unprepared Naval Station and to a country that thought it could stay out of the war. But Rafe and Danny train for a counterattack on Tokyo to send Japan a message that America can and will punish those who attack the U.S.

Is It Any Good?

Director Michael Bay has visual flair and superb command of action sequences. Dan Ackroyd is fine as an intelligence officer and Jon Voight shows us FDR's compassion, political skill, and intelligence. Affleck, Hartnett, and Beckinsale look gorgeous and do their best to give some depth to the cardboard characters, but they cannot overcome a soapy plot and dialogue that is often wooden and sometimes wildly anachronistic. Pearl Harbor fails to provide any sense of the reason for the conflict, and it bends over backward to be fair to the Japanese, portraying them as brave and loyal. But it is also dismayingly U.S.-centric, showing (inaccurately) both the English and the Japanese in awe of American spirit and strength.

But both the love story and the war story here have a synthetic feel to them that doesn't permit us to care enough. Like Titanic , Pearl Harbor ties a love story to a catastrophe, with the theory that if it can make us care, make us gasp, and make us cry, they'll have a box-office bonanza. It's worth seeing -- but only once.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the events that led to World War II and about some of the real-life characters who are depicted. Make sure that they know that in 1941, the armed services were segregated. Dorie Miller, like most other black soldiers, was not trained to fight and was assigned to cooking and menial jobs.

Michael Bay movies tend to have a similar style. How is Pearl Harbor a good example of this?

Movie critics were brutal in their reviews of Pearl Harbor , criticizing aspects like the dialogue, the love triangle, and the never-still camera shots. What do you think? Are movie critics given too much credit from audiences as well as the movie studios, who use the critics' positive reviews of their movies to help market them on movie posters and DVD cases?

Movie Details

In theaters : May 25, 2001
On DVD or streaming : December 4, 2001
Cast : Ben Affleck , Josh Hartnett , Kate Beckinsale
Director : Michael Bay
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Walt Disney Pictures
Genre : Drama
Character Strengths : Courage
Run time : 183 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sustained intense war sequences, images of wounded, brief sensuality and some language
Last updated : August 29, 2023

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Pearl Harbor (United States, 2001)

To think of uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and action director Michael Bay is to be reminded of popcorn-and-eye candy trifles like The Rock and Armageddon - movies where flashy special effects and lobotomized scripts are arguably assets. The pairing of Bruckheimer and Bay does not provoke thoughts of a serious epic set against a grand, historical backdrop - and Pearl Harbor illustrates why this is the case. It's a mystery why, with $135 million being spent on this motion picture, a few dollars couldn't have been lavished on the screenplay. The writing (credited to Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace) isn't just mediocre - it's embarrassingly bad. This movie has more howlers than the average comedy - and all of those lines are, of course, unintentionally funny.

Perhaps one of the reasons I experienced such an unexpectedly negative reaction while watching Pearl Harbor is that the movie had the potential to be so much better. The cast is solid, the special effects are first-rate, and the subject is inherently compelling. The events which shattered the stillness of the morning of December 7, 1941 obsess history buffs to this day. Aside from 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora! , no feature film has effectively captured the scope of the Japanese offensive of that day. Sadly, while Pearl Harbor presents a credible, digitally-enhanced re-creation of the attack, that's one of the few things the movie accomplishes. From start to finish, the centerpiece action takes only 35 minutes - or about 20% of the overall running time.

Pearl Harbor is a Titanic wannabe that falls far short of the mark. Even those who don't appreciate Titanic are likely to acknowledge how much better it is than Pearl Harbor on nearly every level. Both films suffer from areas of historical error, but, while Titanic manages to overcome its factual discrepancies by presenting an absorbing spectacle, Pearl Harbor sinks beneath the weight of its own split personality: ponderous and self-important on one hand, pandering to an uneducated audience on the other. Plus, while Titanic earns its three-plus hour running length, Pearl Harbor doesn't. It has to incorporate a lame prologue and out-of-place third act in order to pad things out to a final screen time of 183 minutes.

Historically, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor represented one of the key actions of World War II, because it sucked the United States into the war. The attack, devised by Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet, brought the brunt of the Japanese military power to bear on Hawaii. In a two-hour period, 18 ships were sunk or badly damaged (including the Arizona , which split in two then went under; the West Virginia ; and the Oklahoma , which rolled over), 188 planes were destroyed (with an additional 159 damaged), and more than 3500 Americans were killed or wounded. Fortunately for the American Pacific fleet, the three aircraft carriers based at Pearl Harbor were out to sea at the time of the attack.

On the day after, President Roosevelt stood before Congress, and, after declaring December 7, 1941 to be a "date that will live in infamy", he urged that a declaration of war be issued. Meanwhile, half a world away, the Japanese celebrated their victory, but Yamamoto wondered out loud whether the attack had been the best thing, saying, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Indeed the Pearl Harbor air raid united the American people in a way that no other event in the 20th century did.

Pearl Harbor depicts all of this (and more - the third act is an account of Dolittle's April 1942 bombing raid on Tokyo, launched from the Hornet ), but does so in a slapdash fashion. It is possible to argue that Pearl Harbor 's agenda is too ambitious for a single motion picture: tell a love story, represent the historical situation, and offer a concluding catharsis that does not come naturally to the tale of what transpired at Pearl Harbor. The movie does many things, but only succeeds in doing a few of them well. As a history lesson, Pearl Harbor can best be described as incomplete and perfunctory. This would easily be forgivable if the picture had more to offer in other areas; unfortunately, it doesn't. So the film's flawed historical context becomes its key selling point.

The story is presented from the point-of-view of three central characters: bomber pilots Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), and nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), the woman who loves, and is loved by, these two best friends. Rafe and Danny are closer than brothers until Evelyn comes between them. But, before the romantic triangle can be sorted out, Pearl Harbor is attacked, and all three are called to perform acts of outrageous heroism (much as one would expect from men and women populating any Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay film).

The central problem with the film is not the reliance upon special effects or the overlong running time - it's the lack of dramatic tension and empathy for the protagonists. Largely because it employs clichés and contrivances to push the narrative forward, the screenplay never draws us into the characters' world, nor does it involve us in their romance (certainly not the way Titanic does). Shortcuts, like montages and flashbacks, are used depict the depth of the characters' feelings for one another. From the beginning, we are subjected to a series of badly conceived and executed scenes, such as one in which two kids accidentally head down a runway in a crop-dusting plane (shades of Anakin's experience in The Phantom Menace ), or another in which an eight-year old hits an adult with a 4x4. The dialogue is equally atrocious. People say things like "I'm not anxious to die, just anxious to matter" and "There's nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer." And we're stuck with a soap opera-style storyline that features brawling as a form of male bonding, people returning from the dead, unexpected pregnancies, and a woman torn between two lovers. Through it all, we are strangely detached from the situation; until the attack comes, Pearl Harbor is not an involving experience.

For about 35 minutes, as the bombs are falling and things are blowing up, Pearl Harbor takes off. Suddenly, we're no longer stuck with dumb character interaction and painful dialogue. Instead, we can sit back and watch the devastation unfold. It's impressive, especially when the Arizona goes down. But, when it comes to an end and the last torpedo has been launched, the movie still has nearly an hour to go. That isn't a good thing, because then the characters start surfacing again, and they're not as interesting as a sinking ship or an exploding plane.

I fault the script and the director (who uses frequent cuts, lots of slow motion shots, and even smears vasoline on the lens for certain scenes), not the actors. Kate Beckinsale and Alec Baldwin (playing General Dolittle) give especially strong performances. It's worth noting that Beckinsale is dressed and shot (using backlighting and soft focus) in a way that makes her look like a female screen icon of the '40s. Affleck and Hartnet are fine, although Affleck comes across as a little too cocky to be truly likable. Cuba Gooding Jr. has a supporting role as a cook who gets involved in the action (the character has no back story - I guess we're supposed to assume it's similar to that of the hero Gooding portrayed in Men of Honor ). And Jon Voight offers a credible Franklin Roosevelt. While Pearl Harbor doesn't have any big-name, A-list stars (the budget couldn't support them), there are a lot of familiar faces, including those of Colm Feore (as Admiral Kimmel), Tom Sizemore (as the mechanic, Earl), Mako (Admiral Yamamoto), and Dan Aykroyd (Captain Thurman, the tactical expert).

You know a movie is being ineffective when you're thinking about all the things it's doing wrong before five minutes have elapsed. Pearl Harbor is designed as a crowd-pleaser, and, as is too often the case with that sort of a motion picture, it values good looking sets, attractive performers, and flashy special effects over an intelligent screenplay. And, despite trying, Pearl Harbor can't even follow the Titanic formula properly. This movie is not completely without value, but there's a lot of sub-par dross to be sifted through to get to the worthwhile material. If you're really interested in what happened at Pearl Harbor , rent Tora! Tora! Tora! or one of many detailed documentaries. If you crave a tragic romance, Titanic is one of many choices. Pearl Harbor only shines when the special effects eclipse the "human element" - better to wait until it's available on video and you have the option of using a fast-forward button.

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Pearl harbor.

2001 Directed by Michael Bay

It takes a moment to change history. It takes love to change lives.

The lifelong friendship between Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker is put to the ultimate test when the two ace fighter pilots become entangled in a love triangle with beautiful Naval nurse Evelyn Johnson. But the rivalry between the friends-turned-foes is immediately put on hold when they find themselves at the center of Japan's devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Ben Affleck Kate Beckinsale Josh Hartnett Cuba Gooding Jr. Jon Voight Tom Sizemore Alec Baldwin Ewen Bremner William Lee Scott Greg Zola Jennifer Garner Jaime King Catherine Kellner Sara Rue Michael Shannon Dan Aykroyd Colm Feore Mako John Fujioka Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Jesse James Reiley McClendon William Fichtner Steve Rankin Brian Haley Graham Beckel Will Bowden Angel Sing Rufus Dorsey Show All… Matthew Davis David Hornsby Scott Wilson Howard Mungo Randy Oglesby Ping Wu Stan Cahill Tom Everett Tomas Arana Beth Grant Sung Kang Raphael Sbarge Marty Belafsky Yuji Okumoto Josh Green Ian Bohen Michael Milhoan Peter Firth Marco Gould Andrew Bryniarski Nicholas Downs Tim Choate John Diehl Joseph Patrick Kelly Ron Harper Ted McGinley Madison Mason Kim Coates Glenn Morshower Paul Francis Scott Wiper Eric Christian Olsen Rod Biermann Noriaki Kamata Garret Sato Eiji Inoue Precious Chong Jeff Wadlow Will Gill Jr. Seth Sakai Curtis Andersen Blaine Pate John Pyper-Ferguson Michael Shamus Wiles Toru Tanaka Jr. Sean Gunn Josh Ackerman Matt Casper David Kaufman Lindsey Ginter Guy Torry Leland Orser Peter James Smith Pat Healy Thomas Wilson Brown Chad Morgan James Saito Tak Kubota Robert Jayne Vic Chao Frederick Koehler Ben Easter Cory Tucker Abe Sylvia Jason Liggett Bret Roberts Sean Faris Nicholas Farrell Tony Curran Daniel Mays Toshi Toda Jaymee Ong Lisa Ross Max Thayer Camille Carida Winston Churchill Tanya Dempsey Adolf Hitler Frieda Jane Kathleen Mullan Lin Oeding Barbara Scolaro Melissa Anne Young

Director Director

Michael Bay

Assistant Director Asst. Director

K.C. Hodenfield

Producers Producers

Jerry Bruckheimer Pat Sandston Michael Bay K.C. Hodenfield Kenny Bates Jennifer Klein

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Bruce Hendricks Mike Stenson Chad Oman Randall Wallace Scott Gardenhour Barry H. Waldman

Writer Writer

Randall Wallace

Casting Casting

Bonnie Timmermann Eyde Belasco Alison E. McBryde

Editors Editors

Chris Lebenzon Mark Goldblatt Steven Rosenblum Roger Barton Clay Rawlins

Cinematography Cinematography

John Schwartzman

Camera Operators Camera Operators

Nigel Willoughby Robert Presley Michael Stone Ian Foster Kurt E. Soderling Kim Marks

Lighting Lighting

Andy Ryan Tom Derose Terry Potter

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Mitchell Amundsen

Production Design Production Design

Nigel Phelps

Art Direction Art Direction

Martin Laing William Ladd Skinner Jon Billington Robert Woodruff Paul Sonski Donna Willinsky

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Eliza Solesbury Jennifer Williams

Special Effects Special Effects

John Frazier

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Eric Brevig David S. Dranitzke Jeff Werner Nathan McGuinness Kathy Chasen-Hay Ned Gorman Alex Jaeger Ben Snow

Title Design Title Design

Robert Dawson

Stunts Stunts

Philip Tan Todd Bryant Jack Gill Matt McColm Kenny Bates Rocky Capella Erik Stabenau Keith Campbell Diamond Farnsworth Tierre Turner Jimmy N. Roberts Benny Urquidez Randy Hall Danielle Burgio Steve Kelso Bob Brown Denney Pierce Merritt Yohnka Kanin Howell Kurt Bryant John C. Meier Diana R. Lupo John Cenatiempo Danny Epper Doc D. Charbonneau Andy Gill Craig H. Davidson Bobby Burns Lance Gilbert Tommy J. Huff Chris O'Hara Tim A. Davison Frank Torres Steve Picerni Gregory J. Barnett Mike Smith Marian Green Tony Donno Eddy Donno Henry Kingi Jr. Erik Rondell Mike Massa Rex Reddick Michael Runyard Christian J. Fletcher Anthony Cecere Lisa Hoyle Dustin Meier Paul M. Lane Troy Gilbert Richard Epper Lincoln Simonds Ivan Bates Tom Harper Danny Rogers

Composer Composer

Hans Zimmer

Sound Sound

Christopher Boyes Greg P. Russell Dan O'Connell John T. Cucci George Watters II Kevin O’Connell Ethan van der Ryn Adam Kopald Teri E. Dorman R.J. Palmer Peter J. Devlin

Costume Design Costume Design

Michael Kaplan Mitzi Haralson

Makeup Makeup

Stan Winston John Rosengrant Julie Hewett Mindy Hall Edouard F. Henriques Stacye P. Branche

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Christine Beveridge Kathe Swanson Yolanda Toussieng Janine Rath-Thompson Michael Ornelaz Dino Ganziano

Touchstone Pictures Jerry Bruckheimer Films

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

French English Japanese

Releases by Date

21 may 2001, 25 may 2001, 01 jun 2001, 06 jun 2001, 07 jun 2001, 10 jun 2001, 28 jun 2001, 29 jun 2001, 06 jul 2001, 14 jul 2001, 31 aug 2001, 06 sep 2001, 14 sep 2001, 23 feb 2021, 18 apr 2007, 05 apr 2004, releases by country.

Theatrical M
Theatrical 12
Theatrical C
Theatrical PG
Theatrical 12+
Theatrical 11
Digital Disney+
Theatrical 12PG
Theatrical T

Netherlands

Physical 12 DVD
TV 12 SBS 6
Physical 12 Blu ray
Theatrical M/12

South Korea

Theatrical 7
Theatrical 15
Theatrical PG-13

183 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

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Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★½ 10

Action! - Three Auteurs: Bayhem

Well, I guess I can check this movie off my list. I’ve heard of it for so long, mostly negative reviews, which of course kept me from watching it.

And you know what? Its certainly Bay's most boring movie. Even Age of Extinction at least had all the dumb, explosions and Transformers around doing stuff to keep you awake. This, however, is boring. The romance is insipid. The runtime is unnecessarily long. Performances—other than Jon Voight in that scene where he stands up from his chair—are mostly forgettable and not even Beckinsale beauty can do so much. There is some interesting and cool stuff in the story, unfortunately, most of it is crap.

That being…

Review by Matt Singer ★★

There’s a spectacular chunk in the middle of this movie, the actual attack on Pearl Harbor, that rates with any war film I’ve seen. Shame about the rest. Michael Bay should make Michael Bay movies, not James Cameron movies.

Review by Josh Lewis ★ 10

The back-to-back popularity of Titanic and Saving Private Ryan while Bay was flying high on Armageddon briefly gave him a false idea of what type of filmmaker he is ranked among and the confidence to cash everything in on nonsensically applying his gloriously tasteless action style to real history in a way that's so brain-flattening and divorced from context the only way you could possibly even stay awake during it is if you somehow buy into the 2 and a half hours of bizarrely nostalgic, expensive Hallmark nothingness that surrounds it. "Do you ever wonder if this war's gonna catch up with us?" Excruciating.

Review by Natalie

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

why would you choose ben affleck over josh hartnett

Review by Tentin Quarantino ☭ ★★★ 6

"I think World War Two just started!"

Yeah, 3 god damn years ago, you American fuck.

Review by russman ★★ 5

I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor . I miss you more than that movie missed the point, and that's an awful lot girl. And now, now you've gone away, and all I'm trying to say is Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.

I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school. He was terrible in that film. I need you like Cuba Gooding needed a bigger part. He's way better than Ben Affleck. And now, all I can think about is your smile, and that shitty movie too. Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.

Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies? I guess Pearl Harbor sucked just a little bit more than I miss you.

Review by Patrick Willems ★★½ 1

Needed more Michael Shannon.

Also, this movie is insane.

Review by Josiah Morgan

i did not realize this movie was three hours long when i started it

Review by Sienna D ★½ 3

The first time that I saw this movie was back in year nine of high school, I guess our history teacher was having a bad week so he took it out on us by making us watch this movie. I'm from Australia so all of the overt American "we're number one" sentiment was mostly lost on us, and all that was left was a bullshit love story and 45 minutes of explosions.

Wow, this is really bad. I had honestly forgotten what a travesty to story telling, cinema and HISTORY this is. There are a couple of decent shots during the Pearl Harbour attack sequence but they don't make up for the hour and a half of the awful, creepy,…

Review by matt lynch ★★★ 3

This is a stunningly fetishized pulp history/mythology, kind of a feature length version of that Pat Benatar video for Shadows Of The Night . But no matter what you think of his skills, Bay's achilles heel may turn out to be his envy of Cameron's veneer of respectability. The trivializing awesome-ization of a tragedy (all good taste aside, the attack is a spectacular series of sequences) is far less problematic than the baldfaced four-quadrant calculation, a much more egregious rejection of Bay's own strengths. It's a mistake to couch the sincere Rockwell nostalgia in a "Johnny Goes to War" B-picture homage; that's a totally extraneous layer of ironic distance, a needless justification for the plastic perfection aesthetic.

BAD BOYS II is the glorious temper tantrum that followed this film's relative public rejection.

Summer 2001 may have been the last time you could escape with straight-faced dialogue like "God help anyone who goes to war with America."

Review by may ★★½

best part of the movie is when ben affleck was dead too bad it only lasted 10 minutes

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DVD & Streaming

Pearl Harbor

Action/Adventure , Drama , Romance , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

Ben Affleck as Rafe McCawley; Josh Hartnett as Danny Walker; Kate Beckinsale as Nurse Evelyn Johnson; Jon Voight as President Franklin Roosevelt; Alec Baldwin as Col. Jimmy Doolittle; Cuba Gooding Jr. as Dorie Miller

Home Release Date

Michael Bay

Distributor

Movie review.

Rafe and Danny are childhood friends who have always wanted to be pilots. The film opens in 1923 with the boys playing in a broken-down biplane on Rafe’s family farm. Danny comes from a less-than-loving home. And Rafe takes on the role of protective big brother. Flash forward to 1941. The two are now P-40 pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and Europe is already at war.

But love is in the air too. Rafe meets the smart and beautiful Evelyn, a Navy nurse, when he and Danny take a physical exam in order to be granted flight status. Afraid he’ll fail the vision test, Rafe hides a cheat-sheet that lists all the letters in the bottom row of the eye chart. Nurse Evelyn catches him, but gives him a passing grade anyway. Romance quickly blooms.

Rafe is eager to fight, and because the United States is not yet at war, he volunteers for the Eagle Squadron, a group of Americans who are set to help the British Royal Air Force fight the Nazi blitz. When Evelyn asks him why he’s risking his life, Rafe says, “I’m not anxious to die. I’m anxious to matter .” All too soon, Rafe is shot down over the English Channel and presumed dead. But when Danny’s consoling of Evelyn turns into attraction, audiences wonder if Rafe will make a comeback.

So what does all this have to do with Pearl Harbor? Nothing except to set the stage for two more hours of cinematic fireworks. Forrest Gump-like, Rafe, Danny and Evelyn manage to be participants in a bevy of major historical events as Pearl Harbor ’s soap opera plot is overlaid on the story of the impending Japanese attack.

positive elements: Rafe and Danny are loyal friends willing to die for one another. Both display a strong sense of duty and a willingness to risk danger to fight evil. A group of pilots, when given the opportunity to back out of what is most probably a suicide mission, all volunteer to remain. Rafe respects Evelyn and refuses to participate in premarital sex. Soldiers and airmen risk death to fight the enemy and to save each other. A Navy captain goes out of his way to compliment an African-American cook who suffers under the racism of the day. A soldier lets the woman he loves stay in a relationship with another man because he knows it’s best for her. One pilot gives his life to save another. Doolittle says, “There’s nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.” Also, in 1941, most Americans still believed in the institution of marriage, and Pearl Harbor reflects that.

spiritual content: A Navy chaplain urges a badly wounded man, “Hold on to your faith, son.” He reminds another of Jesus’ words, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” When the man dies, the chaplain says, “Go with God, my son.” A priest gives last rites to dead sailors. An American pilot crosses himself before taking off. His mission commander asks, “When did you find religion?” “When you assigned me to this mission,” he responds. “Then pray for both of us,” the mission commander says. A pilot who is shot down relates how, when he thought he was going to die, he made a deal with God to be allowed to live. “I kept my end of the bargain,” he says. A flirtatious and irreverent nurse quips after a church service, “I just had my slate wiped clean. Now I can think about how I can dirty it up again.” A soldier, looking around at the utter destruction, asks, “Where is God in all this?” President Roosevelt, speaking of his being confined to a wheelchair because of polio, says God brought him down to that level so that he could better understand God’s will. On the other hand, Japanese pilots pray to their ancestors before a Shinto shrine.

sexual content: A soldier gives advice on how to seduce nurses. The nurses joke among themselves about seeing men in their underwear, and one comments on a soldier’s “cute butt” after she gave him an inoculation (audiences also see a couple of “cute butts” along the way). A nurse looks forward to “making out.” Another nurse says to a soldier, “Tonight you’re mine!” Rafe, when tempted to take Evelyn up to a hotel room, decides not to. “I can’t do this,” he says. “It’s not right. I don’t want anything to regret later. That’s what I want to come home to.” A mechanic berates a pilot who is painting the figure of a barely clad woman on the nose of a bomber: “I don’t want anyone painting [breasts] on my airplane.” A woman wears a low-cut nightgown. Others wear bikinis. A soldier comments, “Don’t you think if your best friend was doing your girl that you wouldn’t come back and beat the crap out of him?” There’s one scene of implied sex between a soldier and nurse, although nothing about the depiction is explicit. The next day, when the soldier says to her, “I’m not sorry,” she replies, “I don’t know. It’s too fast.” The results of that liaison are portrayed neutrally.

violent content: While the film features intense battle scenes, the violence is not nearly as explicit or gruesome as in the film it is likely to be compared with, Saving Private Ryan . Men are blown up by torpedoes and bombs. Others are engulfed in flames. Japanese planes strafe sailors in the water and men running across a runway. Japanese and American planes are shot down and crash into buildings or ships. Sailors drown in a flooding engine room. Badly burned and wounded men stagger toward a hospital. Blood spurts across a nurse’s white uniform. And a jumble of dead bodies is lifted out of the water in a cargo net. Survivors of the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo engage in a close firefight with Japanese troops. A pilot is assigned a plane whose pilot was killed and whose blood is still splattered across the canopy. Elsewhere, soldiers engage in a bar fight and participate in a dirty boxing match. At the beginning of the movie Danny’s abusive dad slaps him around. Rafe comes to the rescue by whacking the dad across the head with a plank.

crude or profane language: The Lord’s name is abused more than 20 times. Other profanities, including the s-word, are used at least that often. American soldiers call the Japanese “Japs.” And during a boxing match a sailor utters an racial epithet aimed at an African American.

drug and alcohol content: Alcohol and tobacco get a lot of screen time. Soldiers and their girls drink beer in bar and clubs. Sailors salute each other with shots of whiskey. Men drink martinis. Some soldiers smoke, and one hands out victory cigars. Japanese soldiers toast their upcoming raid.

other negative elements: Both Rafe and Danny are willing to break the rules, starting with Rafe’s use of a cheat-sheet during the eye exam. He later tells a nurse, “I know I’m a bad influence” as he steals a boat to take her on a harbor cruise. Danny disobeys regs by taking Evelyn for a spin in his fighter. Sailors play dice and wager on a boxing match. The Americans are understandably enraged by the Japanese sneak attack, but talk of fighting back often turns to crude talk of revenge.

conclusion: As a military history buff, I was pleased to see a mostly-accurate account of the attack on Pearl Harbor with only a few liberties taken for the sake of the story. But I was upset that the Japanese admirals and generals are portrayed as having had no choice but to attack the American fleet. History disagrees. Besides, many of their comments and actions are far removed from the context of the day. In the movie, a Japanese gunner, seeing children near the area where the attack is to begin, tries to motion the kids to safety. In reality, American soldiers were keenly aware of the glee exhibited by some of the attacking pilots. “The bombing [in the movie] was the way it happened,” remembers Pearl Harbor veteran Daniel S. Fruchter. But it seems the way the pilots were portrayed left a bit to be desired. “They came down to 40 to 50 feet. You could see the mustaches on their faces. Not only that, but the grins as well.”

I was expecting 21st-century morality to be grafted onto 1941 (think Titanic ), but for the most part the men and women in this movie behave as they do in movies from that era. Still, Pearl Harbor is without question intense , and the soap opera subplot is problematic more than once. Not to mention the profane language. So do the overall historical messages of courage, loyalty and sacrifice fully compensate? No. Swim carefully in this harbor. Entertainment Zeros are lurking.

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‘Pearl Harbor’ is actually a good movie and all you critics are just haters

Hating 'Pearl Harbor' is not a personality trait.

By Haley Britzky | Updated Oct 7, 2021 7:38 PM EDT

Task & Purpose photo composite of the 2001 movie "Pearl Harbor."

It’s time I officially admit something to the world: I unironically like the 2001 World War II drama “Pearl Harbor.”

You probably think I misspoke, which is understandable considering how widely hated that movie seems to be, so I’ll say it again: I like “Pearl Harbor.” I always have.

The romance is perfectly cheesy, the drama is overwhelming, young Ben Affleck is, well, young Ben Affleck. Need I say more? Apparently I do, because I’ve discovered that to many in the military community, I might as well be saying that I like kicking puppies. I never thought enjoying that movie would be as controversial as it is, and frankly I think the hate that it gets is a bit much.

“Pearl Harbor” is not the greatest war movie ever made. It’s not even the best World War II movie ever made. But I’m not here to tell you that it is. I’m here to address the critics and tell them why it’s a good, enjoyable movie, and that their refusal to acknowledge that fact, their insistence that “Pearl Harbor” is the worst thing to ever happen to World War II cinema, is far more dramatic than any Michael Bay film could ever be. (For the record, he directed “Pearl Harbor.”)

One of the biggest complaints is that it’s not historically accurate. That’s a fair critique, and one that people love to make about war movies, because it’s a mistake that gets made a lot . Hollywood is unfortunately not known for getting all the minutiae of military service right, so much so that when it happens, it’s notable . I guess my question is, why are we shocked that another blockbuster film doesn’t nail every detail right?

Despite the historical inaccuracies, even some folks on Reddit could acknowledge that the film’s portrayal of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack is “pretty impressive from a visual standpoint” and a “nice spectacle.”

The roughly-35 minute scene opens with Japanese planes flying over an unsuspecting community before suddenly attacking, and it is devastating and overwhelming. One example of that is when Kate Beckinsale, playing U.S. Navy Lt. Evelyn Johnson, is told to go outside and begin sorting through the flood of injuries just after the attack. They don’t have the resources to save everyone and has to triage the wounded and make snap-second decisions about who is most likely to survive. While doing so, she finds her fellow nurse and friend, Betty, played by Jaime King, dead. Betty, only 17 and desperately in love with her new fiancé — it’s heartbreaking, made even more so when Sandra, another nurse, played by Jennifer Garner, realizes what’s happened and begs Evelyn to “check her one more time.”

“Go back to work, Sandra,” Evelyn says.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sandra replies. It’s a heart-wrenching moment. After weeks of relative calm, where the most they had on their hands were some gnarly sunburns from the beach, these nurses are suddenly overwhelmed by trauma and loss. Plenty of other movies have grappled with the randomness of death in combat and been lauded for it, but for some reason “Pearl Harbor” gets, at best, a shrug about how its depiction of war is a “nice spectacle.” I think it’s safe to say that the most important part of the film — the actual attack on Pearl Harbor — is actually done pretty well, at least in the way that it conveys the absolute devastation of that day.

I could stop there, but I won’t because I know this film’s critics have another axe to grind: The love triangle. Let’s get into that , shall we?

Hating on a movie because it’s a love story is lazy at best, and it’s beyond me why people think a love triangle during World War II is so unfathomable. If anything, there were probably rampant love triangles all over the place during the war because it would be so easy to pull something like that off — no social media, no Skype or Zoom calls, just weeks of time in between letters. I have a feeling the Danny-Evelyn-Rafe drama of “Pearl Harbor” is barely scratching the surface.

Not to mention that many of the people who are so aghast by such a thing — “A love triangle with two pilots and a nurse?” the criticism usually goes. “Where one is shot down over the ocean and presumed killed in action, only to suddenly reappear later? Give me a break!” Bear in mind that these are likely the same people who are ready to write a 20-page dissertation about why “Battle: Los Angeles” is a top-tier war film.

Don’t get me wrong, “Battle: Los Angeles” is a great movie — I watched it for the first time before writing this and thoroughly enjoyed it — but it’s also a great movie about an alien invasion. Do you really expect me to believe a messy love triangle in World War II is more unrealistic than an alien invasion?

Ultimately, it seems like the biggest reason that people hate this movie is because of the romance. And if that’s the case, folks, I have some bad news: That is not even close to the cheesiest love story to hit the big screens. (I mean really, have you never heard of Nicholas Sparks?) And if that’s really what you’re taking issue with, then accept it’s not for you and move on.

And on this whole topic of realism, let’s not forget that “Pearl Harbor” also tells the story of how Lt. Red Winkle proposes to his girlfriend, Betty, after just a few months of knowing her. That is a story as old as time.

One of the travesties of all this hate on “Pearl Harbor” is that critics — most of whom probably saw it once years ago and have since made hating it a personality trait — try to ward people off from watching a movie that actually highlights the service of some of the military’s unsung heroes, like Mess Attendant Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the film.

You can try to tell me that you don’t get chills during the scene where Miller takes over the ship’s anti-aircraft gun, knowing that the Navy refused to train him on how to shoot because he’s Black, but I simply won’t believe you. It may not have happened exactly as “Pearl Harbor” portrayed it, but how many people who otherwise may not have heard about Miller’s real-life heroism, which earned him the Navy Cross , actually learned about him because of this movie?

No one is asking you to declare “Pearl Harbor” the best war movie of our time. It’s not. But it is an entertaining Hollywood film that appeals to those who want a war movie, and audiences who want a love story. Yes there are historical inaccuracies, and yes there are still some great scenes. But surely you have better things to do than making it your life’s work to shame anyone who enjoys it into oblivion.

“Pearl Harbor” is simply a good movie and I’ll stand by that. But feel free to send me all the hate mail you want. I am fueled by your rage.

The Best Movies About Pearl Harbor, Ranked By History Buffs

Any student of American history will remember the date December 7, 1941. The attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor was devastating. Many ships were damaged. Two of them - the USS Arizona and the USS Oklahoma - were lost entirely. Worse, the raid took the lives of over 2,000 people . It was arguably the most significant catalyst for the United States' involvement in World War II.

Naturally, this true story has been adapted several times to the silver screen. World War II has made for some of the greatest war movies of all time , and this particular chapter is rife with tragedy, pathos, heroism, and shocking turns. Many filmmakers have put their unique stamp on this era of history, which means there are plenty of great films to choose from.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

The Story It Tells : Tora! Tora! Tora! is unique in that it tells the story of Pearl Harbor from both sides’ perspectives. The film begins with the Japanese plotting the attack in great detail. Meanwhile, Americans decipher their secret code and learn of the planned attack. They beef up their defenses at Pearl Harbor but fall short. Then the film goes back and forth between the Japanese and United States’ perspectives (where viewers see a more nuanced view of Japanese feelings and behavior). Unlike most films about Pearl Harbor, the attack occurs in the ending moments of the film.

Historical Accuracy : The film scores pretty high in the accuracy department. Some technical advisors who worked on the film had actual experience from the Pearl Harbor attack. The movie also portrays the attack's background quite accurately, right down to the poor relationship between the United States and Japan. And if that weren't realistic enough, some of the aerial combat was filmed with vintage warplanes from the 1940s.

Critical Reception: Tora! Tora! Tora! wasn't exactly a success. It was a box office bomb when it came out, and modern audiences tend to find it emotionless and a bit empty .

'Storm Over the Pacific' (Released In The US As 'I Bombed Pearl Harbor')

The Story It Tells: Made by the studio that brought the world Godzilla (Toho Studios), Storm Over the Pacific is the tale of a Japanese bombardier, Lt. Koji Kitami. It begins with Kitami participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the attack succeeds, he goes home to Japan. Later, he takes part in the infamous Battle of Midway. Following the Japanese defeat in the battle, Kitami starts questioning his belief in Japan.

Historical Accuracy : The movie starts with an accurate portrayal of what happened at Pearl Harbor, but predominantly focuses on the Battle of Midway. The scenes at the Battle of Midway, in particular, are accurate to the Japanese experience of the fight . The way Kitami reacts after the battle is similar to that of many Japanese during the war and the film is more accurate to the Japanese perspective during the war, as opposed to the Americans'.

Critical Reception: Known in the US as I Bombed Pearl Harbor , the film received some criticism for its use of miniatures but some praise for being an accurate retelling of the other side.

The Story It Tells : After Pearl Harbor is attacked and the US enters the war, the United States figures out the Japanese are planning to attack the Midway Atoll. The movie follows the story of Wade McClusky and Dick Best as they participate in the events leading up to and during the Battle of Midway. The movie switches between Japanese and US action throughout, building tension and intrigue before the battle. The film then shifts the action to the battle itself, followed by what happens to the key characters in its aftermath.

Historical Accuracy : According to director Roland Emmerich, the film was supposed to be as accurate as possible. Many parts of it are, too. The ships are extremely faithful to the time, and the script received advisement from Naval History and Heritage Command historians. Additionally, Emmerich enlisted help from the US Navy itself to ensure accuracy.

Critical Reception : Midway did not do very well when it came out, despite its historical accuracy. Criticized for its story and dullness, critics didn't care for it much at all .

Pearl Harbor

The Story It Tells : Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor is a war drama mixed with plenty of romance (more specifically, a love triangle). Focusing on two friends (Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker) who also happen to be pilots, the film follows the lead-up and planning of the attack by the Japanese, the attack itself, and its aftermath. It begins with showing the friends playing together as kids and establishing how close they are. Then it shifts to 1941, where both characters are serving together. One of them, Rafe, gets shot down in a bombing raid, but returns the day before Pearl Harbor. The next day, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, during which our heroes fight back in their own planes. The remainder of the film shows how Danny and Rafe handle the aftermath of the attack, including a secret mission of their own.

Historical Accuracy : Pearl Harbor isn’t exactly historically accurate. There are a lot of inconsistencies and just plain incorrect history . If the love triangle angle isn't bad enough, there are also minor aspects of the film that don't make any sense. Uniforms are incorrect, facts are presented inaccurately, and aspects of the Japanese navy are also incorrect. And there are plenty more . Let's just say that, out of all the films made about Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor is one of the least historically accurate. This is one film you won't find on a list of underrated war films !

Critical Reception : Pearl Harbor is an overly long, historically inaccurate film, and the critics really didn't like it when it came out. Its average rating is relatively low and it's considered tedious and overly long .

In Harm's Way

The Story It Tells : The story begins on December 6, 1941 (one day before the Pearl Harbor attacks). The next day, William “Mac” McConnell reports for duty on his Destroyer, the USS Cassiday. When he notices a formation of Japanese aircraft flying toward Pearl Harbor, he sounds the alarm. But he's too late. The Cassiday flees, becoming one of only a few ships to survive the attack. Afterward, the story switches to another officer, Rockwell Torrey, who gets switched to desk duty after his cruiser is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The action takes Torrey through romance and a meeting with his estranged son. During the meeting, he discovers info about Operation Skyhook, over which he later takes command. The film ends with Torrey being rescued during a great battle by Mac and, eventually, being honored for his role in the operation.

Historical Accuracy: Despite the focus on personal relationships in the film, some elements are fairly accurate, like the sense of loneliness and relationships between some characters. Some of the ships during the initial attack are based on real ships from the harbor, but there are plenty of inaccuracies throughout the film.

Critical Reception: Despite its sprawling narrative and epic story, the film has mixed reviews, with critics finding it slow and cliched . Although nominated for an Academy Award (for its amazing cinematography) when it came out, it didn't win the prestigious honor.

From Here to Eternity

The Story It Tells : In this 1953 classic, Robert E. Lee Prewitt (played by the inimitable Montgomery Clift) switches from the bugle corp to a rifle company. His new commanding officer learns about his past as a boxer and tries to get Prewitt to join his boxing club. When Prewitt refuses, the new CO makes life hard for Prewitt and, later, his entire company. The film sees Prewitt and his friend Maggio (played by Frank Sinatra, no less) deal with a violent sergeant, tangled love stories, and eventually a fight between a different sergeant and Prewitt. On the night of the attack, Prewitt gets killed as he attempts to return to the barracks.

Historical Accuracy : The movie is less a story about Pearl Harbor than it is a story set against the backdrop of those events. The movie was based on a novel, which itself takes a realistic approach to the daily life of soldiers. The film is known for how realistically it showed the boredom in the barracks and the pent-up frustrations of soldiers and their command, exposing the way things really were during the war.

Critical Reception : From Here to Eternity was incredibly well received , winning multiple awards in its time and, more recently, being selected for preservation by the Library of Congress. Although dated in some ways, it holds up as an inspiring and high-quality film.

The Final Countdown

The Story It Tells : In the best tradition of Harry Turtledove, The Final Countdown is an alternative history sci-fi flick more than anything else. After being assigned to the USS Nimitz , Warren Lasky finds himself on a strange adventure. Somehow, the Nimitz gets caught up in a weird storm. When it subsides, it turns out they've catapulted back in time to the day before Pearl Harbor. In the past, the Nimitz gets attacked and rescues someone from the time period. Then they're faced with the ultimate question: Since they know what's going to happen, do they intervene? Or do they sit back and let events play out as they always have?

Historical Accuracy : Some parts of the film are pretty accurate, like the aircraft carrier and many of the real-life aircraft used during the film . There’s also a painstakingly accurate recreation of the Pearl Harbor scene from Tora! Tora! Tora! But given its use of time travel and some other creative liberties the film took with its story, it’s not historically accurate at all.

Critical Reception : For an alternative history film from 1980, the film garnered some pretty positive ratings. Unfortunately, the movie takes itself too seriously and the critical consensus reflects as much .

The Story It Tells : After the Pearl Harbor attack, B-17s set out on flight. One of them (the Mary Ann ) gets ordered to fly to Wake Island to defend The Phillippines. During the trip, war is declared. The Mary Ann then sets out to fight but gets overwhelmed by Japanese fighters. The crew repairs the Mary Ann and heads off to fight many more battles during the war.

Historical Accuracy : Air Force holds a unique position among war movies, as it came out only two years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Because of this, it was less a document of events and more of a way to boost morale. Some events are dramatized or never actually happened (like Japanese-Americans being spies who engage in sabotage). And a large portion of the film is fictionalized despite supposedly being based on a true story.

Critical Reception : Air Force was critically acclaimed in its time. Although some modern critics might call it propaganda, it remains an emotional, action-packed film that can be enjoyed in any generation.

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Looking closer at some of the best, most realistic, most brutal depictions of war in the history of entertainment.

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Pearl Harbor

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Bitch all you want about Pearl Harbor being nothing more than forty minutes of showoff stunts padded with more than two hours of a love story that exceeds all known tolerance levels for sappiness. Call it Pearl Slobber, or nail it as bogus history, as a Titanic wanna-be, as a gamer’s fantasy of war. From its opening calendar-art sunrise to the “There You’ll Be” love theme that Faith Hill sings over the final credits, Pearl Harbor is deep-down phony.

To producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay, who grossed $550 million worldwide on their last collaboration, the appalling Armageddon , those put-downs don’t spell defeat — they add up to major box office. Never mind that the Japanese surprise attack on the Hawaiian military base at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, took the lives of more than 3,500 soldiers and civilians and sped America’s entry into World War II. As Bay says, “Historians have to understand that we are making a movie here.”

Well, then. Bay has learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. The trailer’s now-infamous point-of-view shot of a bomb about to crash through the decks of the USS Arizona tips the film’s hand. The way Bay shoots it, that bomb damn near rivals the size of the asteroid headed for Earth in Armageddon (“It’s the size of Texas, Mr. President”). Last summer, we all lined up to watch a giant wave sink a fishing boat in The Perfect Storm . This summer, the bomb is the big draw. Bay and Bruckheimer have turned a real-life tragedy into a carnival attraction. Step right up, folks, and watch carnage that’s suitable for framing. Bombs, torpedoes, destroyers, war planes and other weapons of destruction are fetishized with the skill the younger Bay brought to his commercials for Nike and Miller beer as well as his award-winning “Got Milk” spot. It’s disturbing that the flavor of the period is better captured in the poster art on this page than in the film itself, which has a glam, sham, lollipop brightness. You don’t know whether to watch this movie or lick it.

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Until now, Bay and Bruckheimer have confined themselves to popcorn fictions such as Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon . With Pearl Harbor , they’re trying to pass off shoddy goods as history and get a piece of the Oscar pie that’s been feeding the ego of Titanic director James Cameron. But the jingoistic bombast in the Pearl Harbor script, by Randall Wallace (yes, he wrote Braveheart , but he also perpetrated The Man in the Iron Mask ), is laid on so thick, even Academy members should wise up to the con job.

“Let’s play chicken with those Jap bastards,” says flyboy Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) to flyboy Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) as they climb into their cockpits, wearing hula shirts, to take down a few enemy planes. That dogfight comes midway in the film, after audiences have endured a painfully attenuated setup involving the friendship of Rafe and Danny as Tennessee farm kids, circa 1923.

Cut to June 1941. Rafe and Danny sign up to fly for Uncle Sam. At the induction center, the bare-assed boys get inoculated by hubba-hubba nurses. Rafe is so attracted to nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) that he lets her stick a needle in his butt twice. It must be love, because Rafe won’t have sex with Evelyn before he ships out to join England’s pilot warriors. He wants to wait — a kiss of death in Hollywood movies. Sure enough, Rafe is reported missing in action. Back at Pearl Harbor, Danny and Evelyn comfort each other over losing Rafe, the comfort level extending to having PG-13-rated sex in a hangar where parachutes billow alluringly. The scene rivals the memorably nutso Armageddon coupling of Affleck, Liv Tyler and animal crackers. Then Rafe returns from the dead. Natch.

Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale — a British actress without a single worthy line to wrap her credible American accent around — are attractive actors, but they can’t animate this moldy romantic triangle. Hartnett, who underplays deftly, nabs the few crumbs worth stealing. And what’s with the heavy lipstick and makeup on the nurses? They look like they’re in a fashion spread on hospital hookers. Model James King has a lively minute or two as Betty, the babe nurse who falls for a stuttering soldier (Ewen Bremner of Trainspotting ). But the young cast is mostly pinup packaging.

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The more seasoned actors, portraying actual historical figures, seize the best chances for hamming. Jon Voight, unrecognizable under layers of latex, plays Franklin Roosevelt, the polio-stricken president who is confined to his wheelchair. It’s exciting to watch FDR stir his Cabinet by rising to his feet. Never happened. But this being a Michael Bay film, it does now. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Dorie Miller, the Navy cook and boxer on the USS West Virginia who has a brief moment of glory behind an anti-aircraft gun. And Mako, the veteran Japanese actor, conveys dignity and resolve as Yamamoto, the Harvard-educated admiral who engineered the Pearl Harbor attack, only to fear correctly that he had awakened “a sleeping giant.” Bay avoids the usual racial caricatures of the time, but his attempts to show fairness to the Japanese side are mostly lip service. It’s Alec Baldwin, pouring on the patriotic rah-rah as Col. Jimmy Doolittle, who serves as the movie’s mouthpiece. Doolittle, a symbol of the Greatest Generation to which Bay’s film pays tribute, is the aviation ace who led the retaliatory raid on Tokyo in 1942, a suicide mission that turned the course of the war and serves as the climax of the film.

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There is no denying Bay and Bruckheimer their due as showmen. They can marshal Hollywood know-how and digital dazzle to fire on all cylinders. But the drama produces no resonance, despite Hans Zimmer’s swelling, bullying score. The film has no soul. The politics of Pearl Harbor , from military unpreparedness to the hunger for war from the White House, were relayed more cogently in 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora! , an ambitious but inert film that tells the story from both the American and Japanese sides. The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa once thought of doing Tora! Tora! Tora! , but he bowed out, to the film’s detriment. The subject demands an artist unafraid of deeper, dangerous currents. Bay and Bruckheimer stick to the shallows. The film’s set pieces echo other, better movies, notably Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan . And you can’t watch the drowning soldiers hanging onto the capsized USS Oklahoma without seeing Titanic and its ocean of death. Pearl Harbor lacks the gravity of those films. It’s always on to the next crowd-pleasing rush or the next Hallmark moment that sets pretty lovers against a painted sky. An epic about this day of infamy should shake you to the core. But the real infamy about Pearl Harbor is that when you exit, you don’t feel a thing.

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Ben Affleck as Rafe. Bruckheimer and Bay were certainly not going to frame Pearl Harbor as a tragedy.

Pearl Harbor at 20: Michael Bay’s bombastically stupid war epic

The 2001 attempt to replicate the Titanic combination of romantic tragedy and blockbuster action remains a limp, if at times visually stunning, failure

H ere is how the love triangle between two pilots, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and his best buddy Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), and a nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) plays out in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, which is now 20 years away from 25 May 2001 – a day that will live in mild ignominy. Spoilers, obviously, for those who haven’t seen it:

Rafe and Evelyn fall in love in early 1941, before America has entered the second world war. They enjoy what Evelyn describes as “the most romantic four weeks and two days of my life”. Unbeknown to either Evelyn or Danny, Rafe has volunteered for the Eagle Squadron, an RAF outfit for Americans to help the British fight the Nazis. They do not have sex. Rafe wants to save that for when he gets back.

Rafe does not get back. Not yet, anyway. His plane gets shot down in the Atlantic and he is presumed dead. Danny and Evelyn, both now stationed in a sleepy little naval paradise called Pearl Harbor, are devastated by the news. Danny offers Evelyn a shoulder to cry on. One thing leads to another. They have sex in a parachute hangar.

But wait! Rafe is alive. Resurfacing mere days before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, he learns, after his months-long ordeal in occupied France, that his best friend and the love of his life have turned the page after an (extremely abbreviated) mourning period. Then Pearl Harbor happens. Breaks the tension. Gives them all something else to think about.

In the days after the attack, Danny and Rafe are assigned to what turns out to be a top-secret, near-suicidal retaliatory mission over Japan. Evelyn tells Rafe that she’s pregnant with Danny’s child and intends to stay with Danny, which Rafe accepts. She does not tell Danny. He doesn’t learn until he’s shot by Japanese soldiers, at which time he uses his dying breath to tell Rafe that he will now be the child’s father. And so it goes: Rafe and Evelyn raise the boy. No prizes for guessing the kid’s name.

The banality of the plotting here, courtesy of the Braveheart screenwriter, Randall Wallace, is self-evident and noted in nearly every review of Pearl Harbor, which opened, as all Bay films do, to poor notices and robust box office. But the truly damning detail – one that extends beyond the love triangle and into every other aspect of the film – is that Rafe and Danny are interchangeable. It doesn’t matter whether Evelyn spends the rest of her life with one or the other. (In fact, she doesn’t have a choice!) Maybe one is a better lover and the other more emotionally generous. Maybe she shares more interests with one than the other, or maybe there are differences in values or politics or preferred pizza toppings. Whatever particular qualities might separate these two humans are rendered so irrelevant, in fact, that Evelyn tells Rafe that she’ll never look at another sunset without thinking of him. This despite the fact that it’s Danny who sneaks her on to an airplane to see Pearl Harbor at sunset. These three are really into sunsets.

There are plenty of occasions to point and laugh at one clunky romantic exchange or another (“You are so beautiful it hurts.” “It’s your nose that hurts.” “No, it’s my heart.”), but it’s this flattening of human experience that defines the film, which folds a Texas grade-school understanding of history into an Epcot theme park attraction. In Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbusterization of mass tragedy, war is not hell but an absolute blast, with hot nurses, picturesque locales and aerial heroics so astounding that the president himself will pin a medal on your lapel.

If Pearl Harbor feels like a recruitment film for a war that would happen about five months later in Afghanistan, that’s not entirely by accident. Bruckheimer’s Top Gun was a boon to the US navy in the mid-80s, and there’s little daylight between the flyboy machismo and militaristic adventure in that film and Rafe and Danny’s theatrics in this one. (To say nothing of the intense homoeroticism. Pearl Harbor is a love triangle in the truest sense. Evelyn and Danny are romantic rivals before they are romantic partners.) And Titanic had laid to rest any concerns that human catastrophe was box office anathema, too, so long as it could double as the backdrop for love story. Fidelity to history was a distant second to fidelity to box-office formula.

BEN AFFLECK, JOSH HARTNETT, PEARL HARBOR, 2001BPHBXY BEN AFFLECK, JOSH HARTNETT, PEARL HARBOR, 2001

And yet Bay remains an astonishing image-maker. That truth can and should be qualified by any number of slanders about how those images are put together and what they signify, but the Bruckheimer school of Miller Time commercial stylists has never had a more prized pupil. It takes 90 minutes to get to 7 December 1941, but the Pearl Harbor sequence is staged with a technical bravado that combines the bombast and pyrotechnics of Bay films like The Rock and Armageddon with shots of eerie beauty. Bay will never be confused for Terrence Malick, but there’s a touch of The Thin Red Line in the sight of Japanese fighter planes drifting past the lush greens and brilliant waters of Oahu at sunrise, an impending violation of the natural world. He even scales back his usual hyper-aggressive editing pace to give his pristine arrangements of planes and ships and bodies a little more room to breathe.

Still, relatively speaking, the most devastating attack on US soil doesn’t look nearly as bad as it surely was. The PG-13 rating gives the film license to treat historic devastation from the bloodless distance of any other blockbuster action movie, and whenever Bay is forced to come in close, like following the chaos of Evelyn’s hospital ward, he turns away like a child getting a shot. The blurred-out images are meant to suggest visceral panic, but their real intent is to shield the audience from any violence that might actually sicken them. And it’s not just a ratings ploy, either: anyone who has seen the 1930 first world war classic All Quiet on the Western Front can testify to its unflinching horror.

And besides, Bruckheimer and Bay only care about loss as a prelude to eventual triumph, whether that’s in the dogged efforts of Rafe and Danny to get their planes off the tarmac or the mini-arc of the film’s sole black character (Cuba Gooding Jr) to wrest himself out of the battleship kitchen and behind an anti-aircraft gun. When Rafe and Danny finally get a chance to have their revenge as part of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, their intrepid leader (Alec Baldwin, sounding uncannily like Robert Stack in Airplane!) likens it to a “pinprick” next to the “sledgehammer” of Pearl Harbor. But damned if the events are not given equal weight here.

“History is written by the victors” may be an apocryphal phrase, but Bruckheimer and Bay were certainly not going to frame Pearl Harbor as a tragedy. Better to leave that to the losers, and celebrate what happened after the sleeping giant was stirred from its slumber.

Ben Affleck
Kate Beckinsale
Michael Bay
Action and adventure films
Romance films
Drama films

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Pearl Harbor Parent Guide

The famous wwii attack is depicted with lots of artistic license..

In recreating the events surrounding the WWII attack on Pearl Harbor, director Michael Bay has tried to do it all---a romance for the girls, with not one but two gorgeous heroes, and enough body-throwing, ship-sinking explosions to keep any guy glued to his seat--all this in only three hours.

Release date May 25, 2001

Run Time: 183 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kerry bennett.

Director Michael Bay has tried to do it all—-a romance for the girls with not one but two gorgeous heroes, and enough body-throwing, ship-sinking explosions to keep any guy glued to his seat—all this in only three hours.

Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and his best friend Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) are swept up in the frenzy that precedes WWII. As ace pilots, they are invaluable American assets and of particular interest to navy nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). But three’s a crowd when it comes to love and that causes some not-so-friendly fire between the childhood buddies. Fortunately Evelyn’s dilemma (and the love story) is postponed while the US Navy deals with a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For a good forty minutes, air bombers, shellfire and torpedo assaults wreak havoc on the Hawaiian paradise and send military personnel scrambling to contain the damage.

To lend depth and reality to the film, the director includes portrayals of real life war heroes, Doris “Dorie” Miller—the first Black American to receive the Navy Cross, and Lt. Col James Doolittle who led the retaliatory attack on Tokyo, as well as showing viewers some little known facts about the raid and it’s aftermath.

But that doesn’t make it a reliable study guide for your next history test. Rather, Pearl Harbor is an ambitious attempt to honor the young men and women who heroically fought a battle they didn’t start and to give us a feel for the events of December 7, 1941.

About author

Kerry Bennett

Pearl harbor rating & content info.

Why is Pearl Harbor rated PG-13? Pearl Harbor is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for sustained, intense war sequences, images of wounded, brief sensuality and some language.

Overall: C+ While friendship and heroism are strong elements in this movie, the inclusion of intense war violence and some gratuitous sexual encounters may leave parents wanting to watch and discuss this film with their older teens rather than sending them out to the theatre on their own.

Violence: C- Father argues with and hits son, boy hits man with piece of wood, couple steal police boat, blood spattered on inside of cockpit, reference made to men killed in action, extended scene of battle between bomber planes, plane crashes into ocean, fight in a bar, extended and intense depiction of air attack with torpedoes hitting ships, bullets being sprayed from planes, explosions, men blown in air, men drown, men shown dying, woman killed by bomb, men bleeding and burned, men shot down on streets, use of guns, men attempt to free soldiers caught underwater; hospital scene includes many bloody and burned men, intense scenes of hospital personnel attending wounded, hospital bombed with patients inside, blood squirting from man’s neck, pile of dead bodies, blood spattered on window, blood being mopped from the floor; dead bodies shown floating in water, rows of coffins shown after battle, men bomb factories and buildings, planes crash into field, plane shot down, hand to hand combat with enemy, shots fired, man dies from shots, blood shown.

Sexual Content: C- Men talk of having sexual relations with women, men shown with only towels around waist during enlistment medicals, bare chests and some bare skin from behind in shown on this occasion and at least 2 others, woman comments on man’s body, kissing between unmarried couples shown at least 6 times, man holds hand low on woman’s back and she comments about it, insinuation of unmarried couples having sexual encounters, man paints breasts on his plane, men shown in loin cloth, unmarried couple engage in sex, shoulder and back nudity shown, unmarried woman becomes pregnant.

Language: C At least: 20 mild profanities, 25 moderate profanities and 25 terms of Deity.

Alcohol / Drug Use: C+ Couple drinks champagne, several occasions shown of soldiers and nurses drinking at parties, men smoke cigars at party, man smoking pipe, men and women toast dead soldier at funeral, men drink when upset, men smoke cigarettes, men drink before battle, hospital personnel use morphine for injured soldiers, men shown smoking during tense situations.

Page last updated July 17, 2017

Pearl Harbor Parents' Guide

During a night on the town, one soldier abstains from engaging in the passionate encounters of the evening, saying that he wants to come back from fighting knowing the best part of life is still ahead. Do you think it was difficult for him to abstain? Did this show his true love and respect for the young woman he was with that night?

“A brilliant man would find a way not to fight a war.” What did Admiral Yamamoto mean by this? Do you think he had some hesitations about the war and realized the danger he was putting his own young Japanese soldiers into during the attack?

How were minorities portrayed in this film including the black soldiers and President Roosevelt’s assistant? How many native Hawaiians did you see in this movie?

Check here for more information about the real Pearl Harbor attack .

The most recent home video release of Pearl Harbor movie is December 4, 2001. Here are some details…

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Pearl Harbor movie review & film summary (2001)
"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will ...
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Pearl Harbor tries to be the Titanic of war movies, but it's just a tedious romance filled with laughably bad dialogue. The 40 minute action sequence is spectacular though. Read critic reviews
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The lifelong friendship between Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker is put to the ultimate test when the two ace fighter pilots become entangled in a love triangle with beautiful Naval nurse Evelyn Johnson. But the rivalry between the friends-turned-foes is immediately put on hold when they find themselves at the center of Japan's devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
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Like 'Forrest Gump,' this movie's characters stumble into history as Pearl Harbor's soap opera plot is overlaid on the story of the impending Japanese attack. ... Movie Review. Rafe and Danny are childhood friends who have always wanted to be pilots. The film opens in 1923 with the boys playing in a broken-down biplane on Rafe's family farm.
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Any student of American history will remember the date December 7, 1941. The attack on Hawaii's Pearl Harbor was devastating. Many ships were damaged. Two of them - the USS Arizona and the USS Oklahoma - were lost entirely. Worse, the raid took the lives of over 2,000 people. It was arguably the...
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Pearl Harbor Rating & Content Info . Why is Pearl Harbor rated PG-13? Pearl Harbor is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for sustained, intense war sequences, images of wounded, brief sensuality and some language.. Overall: C+ While friendship and heroism are strong elements in this movie, the inclusion of intense war violence and some gratuitous sexual encounters may leave parents wanting to watch and ...

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