pearl harbour movie review

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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

Josh Hartnett as Danny Walker

Ben Affleck as Rafe McCawley

Alec Baldwin as Doolittle

Kate Beckinsale as Evelyn

Cuba Gooding Jr. as Dorie Miller

Jon Voigt as President Roosevelt

• Randall Wallace

Directed by

• Michael Bay

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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

This formulaic three-hour opus seems to go on from here to eternity.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Apr 30, 2024

'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.

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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• 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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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 . 

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 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.

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 . 

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 .

• Attack on Pearl Harbor
• Entertainment
• Watchworthy
• Historical Entertainment

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

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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‘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

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.

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Want to write for Task & Purpose? Learn more here and be sure to check out more great stories on our homepage.

Haley Britzky was the Task & Purpose Army reporter from 2019 to 2022. She previously worked at Axios covering breaking news. She reports on important developments within the service, from new uniforms to new policies; the realities of military life facing soldiers and their families; and broader cultural issues that expand outside of the Army, touching each of the military services.  Contact the author here.

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Pearl harbor.

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 Sam Arnold

Director Director

Michael Bay

Producers Producers

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

Writer Writer

Randall Wallace

Casting Casting

Bonnie Timmermann Eyde Belasco Alison E. McBryde

Editors Editors

Steven Rosenblum Mark Goldblatt Chris Lebenzon Roger Barton

Cinematography Cinematography

John Schwartzman

Assistant Director Asst. Director

K.C. Hodenfield

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

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

Lighting Lighting

Tom Derose Terry Potter Andy Ryan

Camera Operators Camera Operators

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

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Mitchell Amundsen

Production Design Production Design

Nigel Phelps

Art Direction Art Direction

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

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Jennifer Williams Eliza Solesbury

Special Effects Special Effects

John Frazier

Visual Effects Visual Effects

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

Title Design Title Design

Robert Dawson

Stunts Stunts

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

Composer Composer

Hans Zimmer

Sound Sound

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

Costume Design Costume Design

Mitzi Haralson Michael Kaplan

Makeup Makeup

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

Hairstyling Hairstyling

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

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

Popular reviews

Review by DirkH ★ 29

Now why did he have to go and stick such an incredible and well shot action sequence in such a painfully bad movie?

It's like serving caviar with a deep fried Mars bar.

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 Natalie

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

why would you choose ben affleck over josh hartnett

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 Tentin Quarantino ☭ ★★★ 6

"I think World War Two just started!"

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

Review by russman ★★ 6

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 may ★★½

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

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 Michael James ★★½

The entire 40 odd minute Pearl Harbour war sequence was literally jaw dropping stuff with visual storytelling at its best. But leaving it aside, the overstretched melodrama really tests your patience with uninteresting characters and romance proceedings. I am still rating it average just for that brilliantly executed repeat worthy action episode.

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Pearl Harbor

• A tale of war and romance mixed in with history. The story follows two lifelong friends and a beautiful nurse who are caught up in the horror of an infamous Sunday morning in 1941.
• Pearl Harbor is a classic tale of romance set during a war that complicates everything. It all starts when childhood friends Rafe and Danny become Army Air Corps pilots and meet Evelyn, a Navy nurse. Rafe falls head over heels and he and Evelyn and Rafe hook up. Then Rafe volunteers to go fight in Britain, and Evelyn and Danny get transferred to Pearl Harbor. While Rafe is off fighting, suddenly one morning comes the air raid we now know as "Pearl Harbor." — shoppingurl3
• Rafe and Danny are best friends who are also pilots. When World War II breaks out in Europe, America chooses not to join but they train nonetheless, so Rafe and Danny join the Army Air Corps. Rafe falls for a nurse named Evelyn, but when he gets the opportunity to join the British Air Corps, he jumps at it. Shortly after he leaves, he gets shot down and is reported killed. Danny and Evelyn, stationed in Pearl Harbor, lean on each other after learning this tragic news. But suddenly Rafe returns, and when he finds out about them, he freaks out and goes after Danny. But suddenly Pearl Harbor is attacked and they shoot down some planes attacking them. Roosevelt decides to retaliate against Japan, and Colonel Doolittle is placed in charge and asks Rafe and Danny to join him. They accept, knowing the chances of coming back are slim. But things between them are still tense. — [email protected]
• American boyhood friends Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker enter World War II as pilots. Rafe is so eager to take part in the war that he departs to fight in Europe alongside England's Royal Air Force. On the homefront, his girlfriend Evelyn, finds comfort in Danny's arms. The three reunite in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. — Jwelch5742
• The classic story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is told through the eyes of two boyhood friends now serving as officers in the Army Air Corps. Rafe is an energetic young pilot who is selected to fly with the British in Europe while America is still not at war. After Rafe is shot down and presumed killed, Danny comforts Rafe's former lover Evelyn, and the two draw closer. But when Rafe turns up alive, the two former friends become enemies, and it is through the turmoil of Pearl Harbour that the two might reconcile their differences. — Anthony Hughes <[email protected]>
• In 1923, two Tennessee boys, Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker, pretend to be fighter pilots in a crop duster. They are very good friends & want to fight the dirty Germans (fallout of WW1). Rafe is uneducated and is always very protective of Danny. He even saves Danny from his abusive father (William Fichtner). By 1940, as grown men, Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett) are First Lieutenants in the United States Army Air Corps under the command of Major Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin). Doolittle doesn't like that Danny and Rafe goof around in a $45,000 airplane. But he admires Rafe for the way he inspires the men and offers him the option of going to Europe and serving in the war. Doolittle cannot order Rafe, as the US is not at War, so Rafe volunteers. Rafe meets Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), a Navy nurse who passes him for his physical examination even though he has dyslexia (after Rafe makes a passionate plea about why he is going to be the best pilot in the US and begs her not to take his wings away), and is instantly smitten. The two soon begin dating and fall in love. Four weeks later, Rafe and Evelyn, now deeply in love, enjoy an evening of dancing at a nightclub and later a jaunt in the New York harbor in a borrowed police boat. Rafe shocks Evelyn by saying that he has joined the Eagle Squadron and is leaving the next day. Before Rafe leaves for England, he makes a promise to Evelyn that he will come back for her. Evelyn and Danny are transferred with their respective squadrons to Pearl Harbor. At the time, Pearl Harbor is considered to be the safest posting possible, and as far as away from the fighting as it can be. The US policy is to cannibalize the Pacific fleet and supply the ships and airplanes to British and Russians to fight the Nazis. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel (Colm Feore), is the commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet and the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Pearl Harbor is considered too shallow for an aerial torpedo attack and the base itself is surrounded by submarine nets. Evelyn serves at the Tripler Army Hospital with fellow nurses Betty (Jaime King), Barbara (Catherine Kellner), Sandra (Jennifer Garner) and Martha (Sara Rue). Danny serves at the Wheeler Airfield with Billy Thompson (William Lee Scott), Red Winkle (Ewen Bremner), Anthony Fusco (Greg Zola), Gooz Wood (Michael Shannon), Joe McKinnon (Matt Davis) and lead aircraft mechanic Sergeant Earl Sistern (Tom Sizemore). Rafe serves with the British Eagles squadron with Ian (Tony Curran) and Royal Air Force Squadron leader (Nicholas Farrell). Petty Officer Second Class Doris Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.), is a cook aboard the USS West Virginia. Rafe is shot down over the English Channel and presumed killed in action. 3 months later, Evelyn and Danny bond over their mourning for Rafe and unexpectedly develop feelings for each other. 3 months later they begin their own relationship and eventually have sex. Meanwhile, Japan prepares to attack the US Pacific Fleet, deciding the best way to do so would be a decisive strike on the Pearl Harbor naval base. The attack is planned by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Mako), Fleet Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy and Commander Minoru Genda (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). The US has cut off Japan's oil supply from Southeast Asia, so they have no option but to go to war. Takeo Yoshikawa (Seth Sakai) is the Japanese spy in Pearl Harbor. Takeo takes detailed pictures of the entire base and sends them to the Japanese military for planning purposes. The Japanese fix wooden fins to the torpedoes to travel in shallow waters. Captain Harold Thurman (Dan Aykroyd), is a US Naval Intelligence officer overseeing the monitoring of Japanese espionage efforts. As near as November 29, Naval intelligence had no clue about the location of the Japanese carrier strike groups. Thurman believes that the fleet is headed to Pearl Harbor. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Graham Beckel) refuses to mobilize the Pacific Fleet based on an intuition and demands hard facts. On 5th December, US intelligence intercepts a call from Tokyo to a Japanese dentist at Pearl Harbor to inquire about the weather and the location of the US carriers. On the night of December 6, 1941, Rafe unexpectedly returns, having survived the crash, and been stranded in occupied France in the interval. He quickly realizes that Evelyn and Danny are now together. Feeling hurt and betrayed, the two friends soon get into a fight at the local hula bar. When military police arrive, they flee the scene to avoid being put in the brig and fall asleep in Danny's car. The next morning, on December 7, they are interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by Zero fighters, Val dive bombers and Kate torpedo bombers. The radar station at Pearl picks up the incoming planes but mistakes it for a scheduled flight of the B-17s coming from the mainland. Just before the attack, Tokyo messages their embassy in Washington to destroy all decoding machines and destroy secret documents, signaling imminent war. The surprise Japanese air raid sinks the battleships USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma and many other ships. The bombers also take out the main airfields protecting the Harbor. Danny takes Rafe to one of the training airfields, which has not been bombed by the Japanese. The USS Oklahoma is capsized due to repeated torpedo attacks and sailors are trapped inside, alive, who eventually drown in a watery grave. Back at the hospital, Evelyn helps tend to the dozens of wounded who come in and must help decide who can and cannot be saved. Evelyn saves the life of Major Jackson (Leland Orser) a USAAC officer. Meanwhile, Rafe and Danny are the only two who manage to get airborne and shoot down 7 Japanese aircraft with P-40s using their reckless tactics, including an old game of theirs called chicken. The Japanese call off the 3rd wave of their attack as they do not have the element of surprise. The two men then go to the hospital, where Evelyn takes blood from them for the hundreds of injured soldiers, and later aid in trying to rescue the many men still in the harbor. In the aftermath, the survivors attend a memorial service for the fallen victims after the U.S. declaration of war on Japan. Over 3000 American lives were lost in the attack. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Jon Voight) delivers his Day of Infamy speech to the nation and requests that the US Congress declare a state of war with the Empire of Japan. Rafe and Danny are both promoted to Captain, awarded the Silver Star and assigned to now-Colonel Doolittle for a dangerous and top-secret mission. The mission was authorized by Roosevelt to strike at the heart of Japan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wants to send a message that the Japanese homeland is not immune from bombing. The US has long range bombers, but no place to launch them from. The Admirals are reluctant to assign the carriers as without the carriers there is no protection against invasion. It is a submarine commander who comes up with the idea to bomb Japan using the carriers and the long-range bombers. During the next three months, Rafe, Danny and other pilots train for ultra-short takeoffs with specially modified B-25 Mitchell bombers. The carriers are exactly 467 feet long. Lieutenant Jack Richards (Kim Coates), a United States Naval Aviator is in charge of making the planes lighter. Before their departure in March 1942, Evelyn meets Rafe and reveals that she is pregnant with Danny's child, although she doesn't want Danny to know so he can focus on the upcoming mission. She says that she is going to remain with Danny, though deep down she will always love Rafe just as much. Danny, Rafe and others are to fly B-25 Mitchell medium bombers from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet on Apr 18th, 1942, bomb Tokyo and some Japanese occupied territory in China. Major Jackson allows Evelyn to sit in the operations room to hear how the raid is going, as a thank you for saving his life. The carriers are discovered 642 miles from the Japanese coast, when the plan was to launch from 400 miles away. Doolittle removes all machine guns from the planes and gives the gunners broomsticks painted black to resemble a gun. Each plane is given an extra 10 cans of fuel to make it to China. The two men succeed in their bombing but crash land into a rice field in China when their bombers run out fuel and are captured by the Japanese who run towards the crash site. Just as Rafe is about to be shot, Danny knocks the soldiers over and is instead shot himself while the other American crew mates fight off the remaining soldiers. Rafe holds a dying Danny in his arms, telling him he can't die because he's going to be a father. With his dying words, Danny tells Rafe to raise his child for him. The film ends a few years later with Rafe and Evelyn, who are together again, and their son, Danny (biologically Danny's son), back at the farm in Tennessee visiting Danny Walker's grave. Rafe then takes his son flying, and the two fly off into the sunset in the old biplane.

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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.

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.

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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…

Related home video titles:.

Perhaps a better viewing choice for families is the 1970 movie adaptation of this historical battle called, Tora! Tora! Tora! —a film that portrays the events with minimal violence, some mild profanities, and no romance.

Disney’s Pearl Harbor is similar to Titanic , in that it suffers from getting lost in the romance of it’s fictitious characters who are set in the midst of a real-life tragic occurrence.

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Pearl harbor.

• Parents say (14)
• Kids say (48)

Based on 14 parent reviews

Why are people shocked that this is inappropriate for children?

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Intense war story’s silly love triangle takes over.

Intense movie is too much for younger ones, hot love-maybe-or is it a bad-a** movie, pearl harbor review, iffy for 12+, what your history books won't tell you.