- Actors: Ben Affleck|Josh Hartnett|Kate Beckinsale
- Directors: Michael Bay
- Format: PAL
- Language English, French, Japanese
- Subtitles: English
- Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 2.35:1
- Number of discs: 2
- Classification: 12
- Studio: Buena Vista
- DVD Release Date: 3 Dec 2001
- Run Time: 183 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (125 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B00005QB7O
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
3,777 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)
- #49 in Film & TV > Action & Adventure > War
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Amazon.co.uk Review
A big summer blockbuster, Pearl Harbor is pitched as a romantic epic, but the story is essentially a frame for an impressive depiction of the Japanese attack on that "day of infamy", deploying all the modelwork, CGI, stunts and special effects necessary to trump previous screen re-enactments in Tora! Tora! Tora! and From Here to Eternity. At heart, it's another Top Gun-style exercise in heroically sublimated homosexuality as Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Dan (Josh Hartnett), lifelong buddies, fall out over a ridiculous contrivance that allows both decently to fallin love with a nurse (Kate Beckinsale) but forget all their differences when the fighting starts--as expected, their big climax comes in each other's arms, with Kate left behind as one wounded buddy extracts a promise from the other to look after his unborn child.
Historical snippets are interleaved, with Mako and Jon Voigt stiff under the prosthetics asAdmiral Yamamoto and Franklin Roosevelt, and a lot of detail is given about things like the wooden rudders on the new Japanese torpedoes, the chaos in the understaffed hospital as the heroine is forced to make lipstick triage marks on wounded men's foreheads and the terrible effects of strafing. A surprisingly bright little performance from Dan Aykroyd (a sole reminder of 1941) as an intelligence analyst is balanced by an insufferably smug one from Cuba Gooding Jr as a token black supporting hero. It's the first film of the George W Bush era: aggressive and dumb as a rock, utterly uninterested in period--no one in this WWII-era army smokes, swears or uses racial abuse (Gooding's boxing opponent sneers at him because he's a cook)--and awkwardly straddles a dignified treatment of the Japanese and America's actual spasm of hatred after the attack (one soldier refuses to be treated by a Japanese doctor, but that's it). When Pearl Harbour is bombed, we see endangered dogs, drowning men and dead women, but when Tokyo gets blasted in payback only buildings are destroyed and in long-shot. Michael Bay (Armageddon) remains a jittery director, a great second-unit man who can't deal with people or stories. It borrows from Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, but tidies the war of the latter up so it can still haul in a broad audience and therefore misses the real tragic sense of the former.--Kim Newman
On the DVD: Considering there are two discs in the special edition of this special effects homage, the second DVD is woefully short of extras. There is a 45-minute featurette on the highs and lows of bringing Michael Bay's magnum opus to the screen which, along with the usual interviews with cast and crew, features the more compelling eyewitness testimony bringing the events of December 7, 1941 to life. The irony of the second disc focussing on the research and quest for historical accuracy is a little difficult to swallow, considering that the film is little more than a paper thin, overly romanticised muddle of history and fantasy, but for those wanting to experience the real events on that fateful day rather than the Hollywood version, this is an excellent antidote. The movie has been THX digitally mastered for superior sound and picture quality improving those big-bang special effects and is presented in anamorphic widescreen with 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Unlike the Region 1 release, there's no DTS track but the 5.1 Dolby Digital sound is more than up to the challenge of the effects laden assault, with different elements of the Japanese attack rumbling between the speakers and making you feel you're in the thick of things. -- Kristen Bowditch
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Subtle as a Brick,
By A Customer
This review is from: Pearl Harbor DVD (2 Disc Set) [2001] (DVD)
Well you have to hand it to director Michael Bay. He has some good ideas about blowing stuff up but absolutely no clue as to structuring an interesting, intelligent and engaging story. Even with blatently ripping off the far superior Tora! Tora! Tora! he still manages to produce this amazingly boring and inept clunker. Why Hollywood has to shoehorn love stories into every second movie regardless of their subject matter is beyond me. Let's see Micheal Bay do a film with a love triangle about the atomic bomb. Couldn't get much worse than this. You can comfortably fast forward through three quaters of this movie and not miss much. The second star is for blowing stuff up. Overall not a fine example of film making.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
2nd rate Pearl Harbor,
By
This review is from: Pearl Harbor DVD (2 Disc Set) [2001] (DVD)
In 1970 the world was educated about the raid on Pearl Harbor when they saw the American/Japanese co-production 'Tora! Tora! Tora!'. In 2001, producer Jerry Bruckheimer went down the same road. Unfortunately his effort was sub-par when compared to the earlier film.
Now, I tend to treat this film too harshly sometimes, but the flaws are still there. Being a connoiseur of the War Film genre, I believe this to be a fairly poor war movie. The love story is too contrived, and comes across as Hollywood, not real life. Dark Blue World (2001) has a similar love story but it was made far more sincere. Secondly the war action is too computer generated. I love to see real aircraft participating in realistic re-enactments of aerial combat. Here, there is an over abundance of CGI, and the CGI is used in a way that puts me off. In my opinion, CGI's place in war films is too add to the realism. Here, the CGI has the opposite effect in most cases. It just looks fake. And if CGI models are used, it is much more effective if the shots created appear as though they are the type of shots that would have been obatined if they hade done it for real. This idea of putting the (virtual) camera is places it could never be in real life simply tells me that what I am seeing is fake. That is very distracting when I'm watching the film. The acting is all right. I have no problem with the actors, but I certainly would never rank them amongst the greats of cinema history. That used to be one of the great pleasures of watching war movies - they had the best actors in the industry. Check out films like Battle of Britain and A Bridge Too Far. They had amazing casts with the greatest acting talents of all time. So what is my overall opinion??? I believe this to be a reasonable picture, but I would much rather watch Tora! Tora! Tora! . This is one for the masses, while Tora! Tora! Tora! is a film for war buffs and historians. Take your pick, but I reccomend the 1970 effort, because you will find out what really happened at Pearl Harbor.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad, actually...not brilliant, mind,
By Apple-eater "Severn Boy" (Worcestershire, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pearl Harbor DVD (2 Disc Set) [2001] (DVD)
It really wasn't anything like as bad as I'd been led to believe by the critics I'd read.
Basically, I was ok with the story leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Even though I'm a bloke, I had no problem with the romantic bits, for example. As a Brit, I didn't like the idea of a Yank single-handedly winning the Battle of Britain. Everyone knows that was done by cricket-playing, handle-bar moustached, middle class Englishmen, saving Blighty and teaching Jerry a lesson. Also, the heroic American dialogue grates, as do some of the effects. But the actual attack on Pearl Harbor was brilliantly done. The sense of the Americans slowly waking up to the fact they were under attack was well portrayed, as was the utter panic, especially at the hospital. That was good enough to make up for the weaknesses mentioned above. What really drags this film down, though, is the bit after Pearl Harbor, which seems to have been bolted on, utterly pointlessly. It makes as much sense as putting a spoiler on a wheely-bin. So, an ok film, which really didn't deserve the slating it got, but which could have been at least an hour shorter.
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