This formulaic three-hour opus seems to go on from here to eternity.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Apr 30, 2024

'Pearl Harbor' effortlessly self-parodies itself. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 22, 2022

Although Pearl Harbor will fill Disney's coffers, it will fail to fill your heart or adequately honor those men and women who were Pearl Harbor.

| Nov 14, 2019

... sensationalizing real events for a meaningless film, then coasting on a huge budget and advertising to lure in moviegoers thinking they'll see historic accuracy and drama.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 11, 2019

...a typically bloated Michael Bay production that squanders its few positive attributes over the course of a ludicrously padded-out running time...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 12, 2016

A tepid, wannabe-Titanic love story, under the stewardship of a man whose career has ranged from the emotional depth of an 11-year-old boy all the way up to a 13-year-old boy.

| Original Score: 1/10 | Jan 2, 2016

Pearl Harbor is a blockheaded, hollow-hearted industrial enterprise.

Full Review | May 28, 2014

As impressive as the physical verisimilitude is, it only accentuates the contrast with the banalities of a script that lacks any fully developed characters.

Full Review | May 28, 2014

The best way to see the movie is as I did: expecting nothing and being pleasantly surprised, and strangely moved, by Mr. Bay's audacity in filming his lovers in end-of-the-world close-ups, however briefly.

| May 28, 2014

The effect of watching a Michael Bay film is indistinguishable from having a large, pointy lump of rock drop on your head. His new picture, Pearl Harbor, maintains the mood.

| May 28, 2014

Pearl Harbor is a bomb, make no mistake. But the movie is such a noisy, persistent bomb that it is guaranteed to draw a crowd.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 27, 2014

For all the 118 actors listed, the movie offers almost no sense of authentic humanity. The faces the filmmakers plaster on their characters are as flat and stereotyped as those on war-recruitment posters.

Full Review | May 27, 2014

Leave it to Bay and Bruckheimer to reduce one of America's biggest military tragedies into a three-hour avalanche of Kodak moments, and one of America's defining crises into a facile exercise in fake uplift.

| May 27, 2014

Three hours and three minutes of guff and goo about the nobility of killing and/or being killed for arbitrary reasons.

| May 27, 2014

There's no dismissing the film, if only because it offers another long, loud example of how Hollywood remains the hagiographic spinmeister of American war history.

| May 27, 2014

The centerpiece is the attack. For 50 minutes, the filmmakers unleash nonstop eye candy.

| May 27, 2014

Bloated and boring, Pearl Harbor is a collection of war-movie clichés.

Full Review | May 27, 2014

Bay seems temperamentally incapable of holding a shot for much more than five seconds.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 27, 2014

Weaknesses of plot and characterisation are only amplified by the film's unwieldy size and patriotic portent, and the script is toe-curlingly bad.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 27, 2014

While the film manages to drag the actual attack out to 45 minutes of its ponderous 183 minute running time, that still leaves a lot of movie to be taken up by what passes for plot -- a convoluted romance of the heavily cliched kind.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 27, 2014