10 AWESOME Movie Trailers (Then The Film Sucked)

The Trailer

Michael Bay is surely a trailer editor's wet dream, given the many gorgeous, bombastic, expensive shots he can give them to construct a compelling piece of marketing.

Case in point, the first teaser trailer for Pearl Harbor successfully cued it up as Bay's version of Titanic - an impossibly mega-budget dramatisation of a real-life disaster, packed to the gills with emotional drama and pulse-racing action.

The goosebump-raising glimpse of a bombing fleet flying past two American boys leads into a glorious action montage, all of it set to Hans Zimmer's "Journey to the Line" from The Thin Red Line - basically a cheat code for selling a movie - and Franklin D. Roosevelt's iconic "Day of Infamy" speech.

The Film

Ultimately Pearl Harbor is a three-hour slog that, as Roger Ebert best put it, 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."

While Titanic's love story captured the hearts of millions, Pearl Harbor's was a staid time-waster, and though the mid-film Bayhem was certainly spectacular, audiences were likely worn down by all the waiting for it.

Even accepting the technical ingenuity on display, the overall corniness of the drama and wonky leading performances make it an absolute chore to get through. Team America was right - Cuba Gooding Jr. needed a bigger part.