Two best friends, Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett), join the Navy to become pilots. Rafe chafes at being stuck stateside while war ravages Europe and takes an assignment to join the RAF in England, leaving his girl, Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), behind. Danny gets stationed in Hawaii and lo and behold, so does Evelyn. Rafe gets shot down, presumed dead, and in their grief, Danny and Evelyn turn to each other. Rafe returns, is unreasonably angry that people moved on, and throws the whole relationship into disarray. Then the Japanese launch a surprise attack against the U.S. Navy ships stationed in Pearl Harbor in retaliation for cutting Japan's access to heating oil and suddenly, this love triangle seems a lot less important.
There's a decent Pearl Harbor film buried somewhere beneath the tons of melodramatic crap in this movie, but it would take a team of skilled editors to find it. It was apparently written by Randall Wallace, the writer of Braveheart, a film whose dialogue is also silly and overwrought but carried far better by its actors. I get that he was probably trying for Douglas Sirk melodrama levels but come on. That's like comparing a toddler crying in a tutu to the Bolshoi.
You know how I feel about Michael Bay.
This is a three-hour bloated mess of tragedy porn and it's currently streaming on Hulu.
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