10 Better Movies That Were Secretly Hidden In Films

Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor may feature spectacularly crafted action sequences, but it's also a wildly bloated three-hour endurance trial, with far too much focus placed on a dull love triangle between Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, and Josh Hartnett's fairly uninteresting characters.

Roger Ebert perhaps put it most succinctly in his now-legendary review:

"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."

The attack on Pearl Harbor is absolutely a story worthy of the big-screen blockbuster treatment, but when the film features so many actual people who were on the ground that day, why place the focus on three forgettable fictional characters?

Perhaps the most interesting inspired-by-true-events story is that of Petty Officer Second Class Doris "Dorie" Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a Black messman who, without any training, took control of an anti-aircraft gun during the attack and shot down several Japanese planes.

As a result, Miller was the first Black American to be awarded the coveted Navy Cross, which any way you cut it is a far worthier and more potential-riddled story than three folks having their romance torn apart by war.

This disparity was so glaringly obvious that Matt Stone and Trey Parker even made fun of it in their puppet-actioner Team America: World Police, with the song "The End of an Act" featuring the line, "I need you like Cuba Gooding needed a bigger part / He's way better than Ben Affleck."