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- Crowning Music of Awesome: The scene after the attack with the lone trumpet playing and the main theme in the background is extremely awesome.
- Ensemble Darkhorse: Many viewers found Danny's pilot buddies (especially Goose and Red), and Evelyn's fellow nurses, a lot more interesting than the central trio.
- Mis Blamed: Michael Bay did not cause everything wrong with this movie. He's not entirely blameless, but just as much is the fault of the writer, producer, and the studio.
- One-Scene Wonder: Cuba Gooding Jr is destined to do this. During the attack he plays a cook who mans a machine gun and downs several enemy planes. This was based on Real Life.
- Romantic Plot Tumor: Veterans from the attack were criticizing the film for both this trope and the inaccuracies.
- Roger Ebert wrote this summary of the movie:
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"Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle." |
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- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: If Bay had simply been allowed to remake Tora Tora Tora, it might have turned out a lot better, even if nowhere near a masterpiece. Shots such as the planes flying from behind the camera, and the first bomb being dropped, give an idea of what could have been.
- Trapped by Mountain Lions: Maybe forty-five minutes of the film is the actual Battle of Pearl Harbor.
- Vindicated by History: Narrowly averted. This movie came out in the summer of 2001, and was critically roasted, doing poorly (by Bruckheimer/Bay standards) at the box office. That autumn, a change in attitudes resulted in this movie attracting much warmer notices when it was released on video. Since then, however, people have once again come to think poorly of it..