Pearl Harbor is an Oscar-winning war film released in the summer of 2001 by Touchstone Pictures. It stars Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr., Dan Aykroyd, Jaime King, and Jennifer Garner. It was a dramatic re-imagining of the attack on Pearl Harbor, produced by the team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, who had previously directed summer mega-blockbusters such as Armageddon and The Rock. The final section of the movie relates the Doolittle Raid, the first American attack on the Japanese home islands in World War II.
Pearl Harbor was released Memorial Day weekend in 2001. Despite its dazzling special effects and a massive promotional campaign, critical response was largely negative, as its 25% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer indicates. Many critics dismissed the film as visually polished but historically insensitive, also citing such literary flaws such as the banal dialogue, underdeveloped love triangle plot, and the shallow nature of the lead characters.
Critic Roger Ebert summarized Pearl Harbor as "a two-hour movie inflated into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle," and claimed that, "The filmmakers seem to have aimed the film at an audience that may not have heard of Pearl Harbor, or perhaps even of World War Two."
Director Michael Bay has said that Roger Ebert's criticism of Pearl Harbor is the most offensive of his entire career. According to Michael Bay: "He commented on TV that bombs don't fall like that. Does he actually think we didn't research every nook and cranny of how armor-piercing bombs fell? He's watched too many movies. He thinks they all fall flat — armor-piercing bombs fall straight down, that's the way it was designed! But HE's on the air pontificating and giving the wrong information. That's insulting!"
The grandiloquent tone of the film was frequently cited as the polar opposite of the 1998 Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan.
Although the movie cost approximately U.S. $132 million to film and promote, it grossed a modest U.S. $200 million at the domestic box office, but it soon earned a respectable $450 million worldwide. Despite many believing it was a disappointment, the film was actually one of the highest-earning pictures of 2001. Pearl Harbor was released on DVD on December 4, 2001, three days before the actual 60th anniversary of the attack.Wikipedia
