Well, it’s Summer-time, which means that the big Hollywood block-busters are coming out in theatres. First up was The Mummy Returns, which I still haven’t seen, then we had Dreamworks ambitious Shrek , which I thought was quite good. Next up, releasing appropriately on Memorial Day, Pearl Harbor, reportedly the most expensive movie ever made (though Disney is claiming that it cost only $153 million, my inside information brought that figure way over $200 million.) Is the film worth the money, well, no film is worth that much money, BUT it is pretty good, if you can ignore the sappy love-story.

What’s the sappy love-story? Well, kick back, and I’ll tell you the harrowing tale of gung-ho boyhood friends Rafe (Affleck) and Danny (Hartnett) and their common lady-love Evelyn (Beckinsale). See Rafe has always looked out for Danny, and while in pilot-training prior to the U.S. entering WWII, Rafe meets and falls head-over-heels in love with Evelyn, a nurse. Just as Evelyn and Danny are getting transferred to Pearl Harbor for permanent assignments, Rafe volunteers for duty with a squadron of American flyers over in Britain. Evelyn is upset, but understands. Danny is pissed, and doesn’t understand. Whatever

The action in the above paragraph takes almost an entire hour to occur. Bloated? Yeah maybe. Once we catch up with Rafe in England, we find him flying actual missions against the Germans, and doing well, having shot down 6 German planes, in the film’s first great action sequences. But, of course, Rafe is shot over the Atlantic, and is believed to be dead. When word reaches back to Evelyn and Danny, they are both devastated.

Jump ahead three months to October (or November, it’s not quite clear), 1941. Danny and Evelyn find that talking about Rafe leads to love, and then quickly to coitus (in a wholly unbelievable scene that takes place in an airplane hanger with parachutes hanging from the ceiling.) Jump again to December 5, and suddenly Rafe is on Pearl Harbor. See, he didn’t die when he was shot down, he was rescued by a French fishing trawler and spent the ensuing months trying to get out of occupied France. Of course, shortly after his arrival he figures out that Danny and Evelyn are an item, and he feels (and rightly so I might add) betrayed by his girl and his best friend. Their attitude is that "well you were dead buddy", so whatever.

Which all leads to the inevitable bar fight the next day between a drunken Rafe and an apologetic Danny, which is broken up by the MP’s. Rafe and Danny escape imprisonment in a beautiful period era convertible and fall asleep on the beach.

Throughout all this love-triangle nonsense are some pretty good sequences featuring Mako as Admiral Yamamoto and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as his right hand preparing for the surprise raid on Pearl. Additionally the film makes strong suggestions that the War Department blew it, because they had an inkling that the Japanese would attack. This information comes primarily from a Navy code-breaker played by Dan Aykroyd. These sequences are extremely well done, and as far as I’m concerned, they could have cut the love-triangle and focused on just these sequences, oh but that movie has been made, and it was called Tora, Tora, Tora.

Finally, about 90 minutes into the film, it’s the morning of December 7, 1941. Rafe and Danny are passed out in their convertible on the beach, and everyone else is either asleep or doing normal Sunday morning duties. A radar operator notes a LARGE blip on his screen, and is told that it’s a flight of B-17’s coming in from the mainland. Everything is calm…until a huge squadron of Japanese Zeros fly in over the island, aiming for Battleship row. The Zeros drop their payloads, which consist of bombs and ingenious air-to-sea torpedoes, which blow the crap out of most of the fleet that is still sitting in the harbor.

Thus starts the best 40 minutes of war recreation that I can remember seeing. The special effects and stunts in these sequences by and far make this film worth seeing, especially the signature shot of the Japanese bomb flying through the air, and then through the decks of the ill-fated USS Arizona. Everything is, of course, jumbled and hard to figure out, which I suppose is the "Saving Private Ryan" effect, but it is still extremely well done, and compelling film.

Rafe and Danny finally figure out what the heck is going on, and try to make it to their base and their fighters. By the time they get to the main airfield, the Japanese have blown it to bits. They rush to a secondary airfield, where the enemy hasn’t made it yet, and finally get into the sky with two, count ‘em, TWO fighters against the entire Japanese attack force. Predictably, they do well, downing seven enemy planes with some help from the ground forces. The attack finally ends, and the survivors are left to pick up the pieces.

After cursory wrap-up scenes, we jump ahead another few months, and both Rafe and Danny have been assigned to Colonel Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) and his "raiders". Doolittle has come up with a scheme to strike Tokyo with B-17 bombers launched off of an aircraft carrier. Obviously this scheme will do little damage, but be a spiritual victor, if not a strategic one. The end of the film comes when the two pilots leave for the raid, but one doesn’t come back, and the love-triangle wraps itself up. There is no 40 years later in a cemetery end sequence, wondering if we did the right thing, rather, there’s a nice wrap-up and the end-credits.

Breaking down a film of this "epic" scope, you have to look at the sum of the individual parts to decide if it’s worth seeing. The acting is predictably awful, especially from the usually solid Beckinsale. Beckinsale, a Brit, is terribly mis-cast as the beautiful American Nurse who falls for not one, but two flyboys. She’s wooden and unlikable in almost every scene, and has no chemistry at all with either Affleck or Hartnett, who are both believable, if not charismatic. Baldwin is nicely understated for a change, as Doolittle, and that’s not easy, since there really was a Doolittle, and he was, apparently, an interesting man. The supporting cast is full of fresh faces all in good supporting roles, with standout performances by the always cool Tom Sizemore, and Danny Aykroyd shedding the comedic skin, as he has done lately.

Then there’s Jon Voight as FDR. YUCK! I would have cast Edward Herrman to play FDR again, especially since he has played the late President three times already!

Did I mention that Cuba Gooding Jr. is in this film? No, that’s because he really isn’t. Well he is, but I think they cut all his footage from Men of Honor, since he’s playing basically the same character. I know, there was a real Dorie Miller, and I know he was the first African American to win the Navy Silver Star, but come on, does Cuba Gooding Jr. have to play all the black soldiers in every period movie from now on?

The technical aspects of the piece are all well done, and that’s unsurprising, since director Michael Bay does nothing if not make professional action films (Bad Boys, Armageddon, The Rock) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer is adept at making large-scale movies. The script by Randall Wallace (Braveheart) is passable, if not exciting. Some have criticized that it jumps around too much, but I don’t think that is a fault of the script, I find that is just what films have come to these days, they are nothing more than longer music videos with bigger explosions and better special effects.

And boy does this have great special effects. In fact, that’s what I paid my money to see. I could have cared less (and now I care even less) about the love-triangle and their characters. No I just went to see shit blow up, and I got that in abundance. I don’t want to take anything away from those men who lost their lives defending our country, and I really do believe that World War II had to be fought, despite my pacifist nature. Recently I have found myself with a resurgent interest in WWII, and this film merely will add fuel to my inner-fire. I hope that it also brings attention to the sacrifice that our fore-fathers made so that we could have world peace and defeat the forces of the Japanese and the Germans.

My rating *** ½ out of 5.