Pearl Harbor Review

The attack itself is staged with a scale that almost nothing before it managed, torpedo runs threading the harbour, the Oklahoma rolling over, sailors trapped behind bulkheads, and the notorious shot that rides a bomb down onto the Arizona. It is forty minutes of enormous craft. It is also weightless, because Bay shoots a real atrocity with the same syntax he uses for car adverts, and because the film has spent ninety minutes teaching you to care about which pilot the nurse prefers.

Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are handed a friendship written in postcards, Kate Beckinsale is asked to look wistful in soft focus, and the dialogue is so bad that individual lines about war and destiny became jokes within weeks of release. Then the film keeps going, adding the Doolittle raid as a third act so the Americans can win something. Cuba Gooding Junior's Dorie Miller is reduced to a montage. Three hours long, and the wrong forty minutes are the good ones.