You left out "The Battle of Britain." Great flying scenes, pre computer, and historical accuracy. Some time is wasted on the obligatory romance subplot, but a better movie than "Pearl Harbor."
And it had honest-to-goodness Hurris... in the air, even! IMHO the best depiction of aerial combat ever.
The CGI in Pearl Harbor is great, but the plot and gross inaccuracies are very bad. The movie industry is now capable of accurate images of large formations. The are awesome scenes - the Japanese planes roar from behind the camera's point of view towards the harbor, the initial low pass of the Kates - the hair stands up on the back of my neck.
Misuse of computer graphics is ruining action movies. Pearl Harbor is possibly the most egregious example of this. Instead of using CG to shoot scenes that couldn't otherwise be shot, Bey uses it to shoot scenes and show POVs that couldn't possibly HAPPEN. Camera at a fixed point 10,000 feet off the ground while planes roar by (of course "Dogfights" is the all-time worst for this with the same identical camera shake EVERY time anything does a flyby. How does a camera that couldn't exist get shaken?). Torpedoes in Pearl Harbor filmed from below through crystal-clear water by a camera 50+ feet under the surface. Gulf War-style "bomb's eye views". Indestructible cameras
inside massive explosions while debris and body parts shoot past. All that crap exists for no reason other than to show off how much money they're spending on FX, and it yanks me right out of the scene and screams "Oh yeah, it's just a bad movie".
But the single stupidest thing in the movie, the stupidest thing EVER in any war movie, bar none, was a shot ripped off from, yes, THE THREE STOOGES. That's the bomb (wrong type, of course) that killed the Arizona falling clunkity-clunk-clunk through the ship's decks at about 20 mph and landing, completely intact, tail fins and all, in the food locker of the galley, where the cooks - and why on earth are there still cooks in the galley peeling potatoes or whatever 15 minutes into the attacks? - stand around gawking at it for a few seconds before it explodes. At that point I was banging my head against the coffee table pleading with an uncaring universe to make the pain go away.
But taking out every historical and technical inaccuracy, this movie is still a steaming pile of godawful crap. Like any Michael Bey film, it is two hours of the stupidest, most mind-numbing and horribly overused cliches, one after another, with mugging and hamming and every kind of horrible acting even by people like Kate Beckinsale who can, believe it or not, actually act. He steals from the very worst sources - half the movie is a rehash of
Star Wars, for Pete's sake! (Not that I don't like
Star Wars, but using it as source material for what is supposed to be a historical drama?!?!?) And the dialogue! Sweet mother of Mary! George Lucas couldn't write lines that bad. ED WOOD couldn't write lines that bad.
Given the amount of money and skilled labor put into it as well as the seriousness of the subject matter,
Pearl Harbor is the single worst movie ever made in or out of Hollywood. Worse than
Santa Claus vs. the Martians, worse than
Battlefield Earth, and yes, worse than
Gigli. And I think that's about all that can be said.
