Pearl Harbor Review

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay don’t make films for critics, they make blockbusters for cinemagoers. Their latest, "Pearl Harbor", stormed to the top of the US box office chart (with a phenomenal $75M opening weekend) and will no doubt do the same over here.

Much like "Titanic" before it "Pearl Harbor" is a three-hour epic based on historical events, with a fictional love story grafted onto it. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett star as two childhood friends who grow up to become fighter pilots, and Kate Beckinsale is the military nurse who gets involved with both of them. All three are posted to the US Naval base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and its partly through their eyes that we witness the Japanese attack that left nearly 3,000 US sailors dead and finally drew the US into World War Two.

The 40-minute sequence chronicling the Sunday morning attack is as spectacular as you’d expect from the most expensive movie ever made (with its $145M production budget), and flawlessly integrates the latest CGI effects with real stunts and explosions. In fact all of the film’s action sequences deliver the prerequisite thrills, and are spread just enough apart to ensure the overly saccharine love story doesn’t become too hard to swallow.

A lot of critics seemed predisposed to take a great dislike to this movie, and you could take issue with the thin characterisation, the cheesy dialogue and the blurring of fact and fiction. But ultimately, who cares? "Pearl Harbor" is a blockbuster movie that will keep you thoroughly entertained, and its brilliant special effects guarantee you really haven’t seen anything quite like this before.