I have stated on this board many times my belief that producer/director team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay have been responsible for some of the worst movies ever made: Independance Day and Armageddeon , for example. Over the weekend I foolishly subjected myself to a couple of hours of Pearl Harbor , apparently because I don’t like myself very much. Holy Limberger, Batman! This stench of this movie rose up into the heavens and caused the gods to light a match!
Where to begin? First of all, Bay, who was a director of TV commercials, can’t figure out how to pace anything longer than thirty seconds. He has no sense of rythmn or timing whatsoever. The action scenes (I did force myself to watch the money shots of the attack itself) were incoherent. It was impossible to tell who was doing what to whom. Somebody tell me why the hell the Japanese spent so much time buzzing women hanging laundry out to dry! Why did a bunch of Vals chase one roadster down a dirt road, and why didn’t they catch up with them sooner? Ben Affleck’s car must have been going three hundred miles an hour! And the whole attack thing is another problem. Bay’s refusal to use establishing shots made it look like the Japanese attacked wih four, maybe five planes. And the only time we do see a whole bunch of Japanese planes approaching the island, they’re not flying in any kind of formation whatsoever. WTF? Just give me one shot of rows and rows of dive and torpedo bombers lined up in careful rank and file approaching the island. That’s scary! By the time that sequence was over, I was praying that Kate Bekinsale would come along and paint a big red “M” on my forehead so I could get some morphine.
And the “love story”–fucking please.
Bay was just trying to rip off Titanic, and THAT stinker now compares favorably with Pearl Harbor. Clearly, I owe James Cameron an apology for all of the awful things I said about HIS crappy movie.
Boy, did Pearl Harbor suck. But imagine this agony: Last spring I was between jobs and “workd” as a substitue teacher a couple of times at my wife’s high school (no, she’s not a student, she’s a teacher, you pervs).
Each class period is about 90 minutes long, and one day the teacher I subbed for decided to let his class watch Pearl Harbor while he was out. So not only did I have to watch that horrible, horrible move three times in one day, I only got to see the first ninety minutes, three times. In case you’re wondering, the climactic attack occurs somewhere around minute 93, for all I could tell. AAAAAAAAGGGHHHH. The pain, the pain.
Wow, I just did an IMDB search of Jerry Bruckenheimer and he sure has been involved in a lot of “big” movies that were utter crap. Except “Black Hawk Down” which he managed to not screw up.
[sub]I didn’t hate “The Rock” or “Con Air” either, but I still wouldn’t call them quality movies, just fun to watch crap.[/sub]
I watched Pearl Harbor expecting it to suck, so I was pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. It’s no Saving Private Ryan, but it’s not Armageddon either.
Of course, I’ve never had picky taste in movies. I laugh at Kingpin.
vibrotronica, when the movie came out there were about 8 billion threads on the Boards about how this movie sucked, I’m surprised you missed them. (Best comment: “By the time you get to the attack, you’re rooting for the Japanese!”) It’s an utterly horrific movie, that I deeply regretting going to see (I caught it opening weekend and thus saw it before the reviews of how horrific it was had hit the Dope.). My buddy and thought going it, “Well, even if it does suck, at least it’ll look cool.” The brief minutes of the attack in no way make up for the unending horrors one has to endure before and after that sequence.
I got lucky with this movie. It was playing the same time as “Moulin Rouge,” so after the end of the first showing, I snuck in for the attack, then snuck back for “MR”'s second showing.
I saw enough of the love scene to pity the fools who had to watch the whole thing. Course, people pity me for liking “MR” so I guess we’re even.
I actually had fun watching Pearl Harbor. Yes, it’s bad, but in what other movie can you alternatively yell, “Top Gun scene! Titanic scene! Top Gun scene! Titanic!..”
Can someone please explain why there is now a 4-disc director’s cut of this movie now available on DVD? As if we couldn’t get enough of the original movie.
Also, wasn’t even the original DVD release spread out over 2 discs? I could have sworn that the film wasn’t even on one disc the first time it came out. I thought we got over that when LaserDiscs bit the dust.
Wait, I don’t get this. Is he saying these particular pilots are really good? But if they’re “so few among us,” wouldn’t he be unsure about winning the war? Or is he saying, “These pilots really suck. Luckily, the rest of our pilots are really talented.”
