Let me be clear: Pearl Harbor is not good; you aren’t missing much if you don’t see it; I don’t recommend seeing it.

But it is not that bad; it is not the worst World War II movie, or even a terrible one. It has some points of merit, and it is an earnest effort by undeniably talented filmmakers.

For clarity’s sake: don’t watch it, but if you do, it will not be the worst thing that ever happened to you, unless you’ve lived a truly remarkable life.

My local used bookstore had the special edition deluxe DVD available for one US dollar—one, and I passed.

This is a movie with many flaws, but its biggest one is that it is too damn long; ain’t nobody got time for this movie. It is 183 minutes—If I do some quick math, that comes to three hours and three minutes. The Longest Day, which should logically be longer—it’s right there in the name—is five minutes shorter. Tora! Tora! Tora! which is nominally about the same event, is thirty-nine minutes shorter. I think they could have trimmed four minutes to at least be able to say it is less than three hours.

The primary reason it’s longer, and an important reason it’s bad, is that it tries to cover too much ground. It is impossible to overstate how much ground this movie covers. If we stay focused on star Ben Affleck (and why wouldn’t we—he’s dreamy) we see a glimpse of his childhood, where he loves planes so much that he (accidentally) steals one when he is around seven; he fights as a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain and at Pearl Harbor, and he flies a bomber in the Doolittle Raid. Ignoring the utter impossibility of one person doing this, his service is not the focus of the film—this movie is a love triangle that happens to be set around these events.

Roger Ebert (who rated Tora! Tora Tora! lower than this movie–calling it “one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made”) wrote that  “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.” No one should ever tire of reading or quoting this line because it is funny, and it is funny because it is true. This movie is absurd.

But.

When Affleck is absurdly a US Army Air Corps pilot serving in the Battle of Britain (seriously, this wasn’t allowed) the scenes of him in dogfights over the English Channel are great—they are tremendously well done. The movement of the camera and the planes is dizzying, yet still clear.

Director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer know how to make big budget action movies that look great. Bay is a great action director—great. All the battle scenes are well done, both by 2001 standards and today’s. The scenes done practically look fantastic, and though some of the CGI is noticeably darker, it is very good. There’s about an hour of action in this film that is well done and exciting.

This means there are also over two hours in this movie that consist of things that are not well done and exciting action sequences. Still focusing just on Affleck, and seriously, I’m a bit of a fan of his, he plays Rafe, the talented yet dyslexic hotshot pilot. If there actually was a dyslexic fighter pilot at Pearl Harbor than this movie should win an award. It seems, however, like less of an attempt to raise awareness and more of an excuse for an extended meet cute with Kate Beckinsale’s nurse Evelyn Johnson. And it is a little cute at times–but only a little.

A love triangle is eventually established between those two extremely attractive people and Rafe’s childhood friend and not quite as hotshot of a pilot, Danny Walker (the extremely attractive Josh Hartnett, Black Hawk Down). But that’s not all: Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting, Wonder Woman) as Red has a thing with Betty (Jaime King, Sin City, Hart of Dixie). And Jennifer Garner (Alias, Electra) plays a nurse they also hang out with who wears glasses and is easily shocked. And Alec Baldwin plays Jimmy Doolittle because . . . he just does. Oh, and Jon Voight plays President Roosevelt.

Both Baldwin and Voight get too much screen time, but that is not a criticism because everyone gets too much screen time in this movie. Maybe Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan) and Dan Ackroyd have a reasonable amount of time for their roles. Michael Shannon, William Fichtner and Sara Rue also have small parts. Glen Horshower (Black Hawk Down, 24) plays Admiral Halsey.

And this is an important point about Bay/Bruckheimer movies: they are festooned with talented actors. You can’t swing a dead cat at this movie without hitting someone who’s done something you really like, who is now doggedly working through trite and overblown dialogue, while wearing period-appropriate clothing. It is simultaneously authentic and completely unrealistic because the filmmakers can afford anything except, apparently, a good script.

The humor is . . . um . . . broad. By “broad” I mean too big and generally not funny. People get inoculations in their butts—it’s in the butt, so it’s already funny—Red gives a huge reaction (see also: Breakthrough). Rafe gets a second one in order to talk to Beckinsale’s character and subsequently faints, apparently because he’s received a harmful overdose of something, which is always funny.

There’s a scene in a night club in New York where all sorts of secondary and tertiary characters are up to all sorts of hi-jinks. Of course, some of the humor works, but much of it doesn’t, and it takes more time. There are around three secondary or tertiary characters I care about (and I only care about Garner’s character because she’s playing her, which is part of Bruckheimer’s genius), but there are so many wearing fabulous period-appropriate clothes in a New York nightclub that I literally can’t tell some of the men apart. And why are we in New York in a movie called “Pearl Harbor”?

There’s a barroom brawl later. Why? Because we can do it all in this movie. Let’s go to the White House and listen to Roosevelt for a while. Hey, let’s show the Japanese side like Tora! Tora! Tora! but in a less interesting manner.

I promised myself I wouldn’t yell at this movie because some people are so mean to it, but all the scenes in the last paragraph could be cut from the movie, and we’d be left with a poorly written love triangle romance set around Pearl Harbor with great action that is too long—but maybe twenty minutes shorter.

Back to why it is not completely terrible.

It looks gorgeous—Michael Bay makes movies that look great, and this is one of them. It starts with a biplane flying at dusk against a beautiful sky, and (spoiler alert) ends the same way. And every frame in between is artfully composed with beautiful people, majestic vistas, period accurate equipment or excellent special effects.

All the action is well done and exciting—except for some of the talking during it. During the well done, exciting, scary actual attack on Pearl Harbor, Affleck says variants on “get me in a damn plane” a number of times (I’ve consciously chosen not to count) before finally getting in one and delivering a bunch of hack dialogue (there’s a “Gotcha” in my notes) while in really exciting dogfights.

And their attempt to find and arm the planes while being strafed is well done; not only is it visually exciting, with Academy-Award winning sound design, but the soldiers wear helmets soldiers there would have worn and use firearms soldiers there would have used. A lot of time and effort by tremendously talented people went into giving Josh Harnett the opportunity to read this line: “I think World War II just started.”

I just checked; apparently Time magazine started using “World War II” in 1939, so this isn’t the most egregious line ever.

I think focusing on the Doolittle Raid segment is instructive. This section, occurring after the the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Intermission (the what? It’s 2001 for goodness sake) should not be in the movie, yet it is for two very sound reasons:

One—Hollywood blockbusters do not end with American’s losing, so let’s add the PR success of the Doolittle raids—how do we justify that? Our fighter pilot heroes are just so good at flying that Doolittle recruits them to fly bombers off of aircraft carriers. This is, of course absurd, except by the simple logic of “we must end the movie with a victory.”

Two—we can construct action on the ground in China after the raid that allows us to resolve the love triangle in the entirely typical way love triangles are resolved, with one character nobly sacrificing for the other (see Casablanca, Armageddon, Gung Ho! and every romance novel ever).

And that’s the problem–there are sound reasons this movie is at least forty-five minutes too long and cutting that time wouldn’t make the remaining dialogue any better. This movie is not terrible in every way–it’s mainly poorly written and directed by a genius at shooting action who finally is not that good at story.

Recommendation

Don’t buy Pearl Harbor; I checked out a copy from my local public library, and it probably plays all the time on sites you already pay for. Apparently AMC+, whatever that is, is showing it for free. I mean–don’t check it out from your public library or watch it on AMC+ either because it just isn’t very good. But don’t pay money for it.

You can probably see Tora! Tora! Tora! for free sometime, and you should see it, but don’t buy the steelbook unless you have some sort of steelbook problem, like I do. Maybe buy Paul McCartney’s early solo album Ram, which features the song “Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey.”

Or, like Rafe, you can start at The Battle of Britain. Wings of Glory is an excellent miniatures game with a Battle of Britain Starter Set–with cool models–you can get Stukas and Hurricanes in the expansions. Other expansions have Japanese and American planes.