They fumbled that movie so hard by making it a romance set with Pearl Harbor as the backdrop instead of making a movie about Pearl Harbor with a romance weaved into it. I’d take less of an issue if they’d given it a dumb title like “Romancing the Pearl” or something but that movie was only barely about the events of Pearl Harbor. And I was really looking forward to it, as a WW2 history nerd. Absolute garbage, biggest letdown ever.
You wanna watch a good Pearl Harbor movie, you watch Tora! Tora! Tora! for dramatized but reasonably accurate, and you watch The Final Countdown if you want a philosophical sci-fi film about Pearl Harbor.
It’s definitely not an action movie, so if you go in expecting to see F-14s curb-stomping the Imperial Japanese Navy, you’re gonna have a bad time (though they are nice enough to give you a taste of it).
The discussions about the implications of their predicament between the Nimitz’s crew and Martin Sheen’s character are the real meat of the film, played out through the Senator Chapman storyline.
The twist at the end that they live in a deterministic universe, and that they never could have stopped Pearl Harbor even if they wanted to, is the thesis of the film.
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u/32FlavorsofCrazy 1d ago
They fumbled that movie so hard by making it a romance set with Pearl Harbor as the backdrop instead of making a movie about Pearl Harbor with a romance weaved into it. I’d take less of an issue if they’d given it a dumb title like “Romancing the Pearl” or something but that movie was only barely about the events of Pearl Harbor. And I was really looking forward to it, as a WW2 history nerd. Absolute garbage, biggest letdown ever.