Generally speaking, Michael Bay movies are a pretty easy target. Personally, I have nothing against the dude. He makes the movies he wants to make, I try my best to ignore them. His style divides audiences, what else can you say at this point? That said, Pearl Harbor is three hours long. Three hours! The majority of the time is spent focusing on this very tedious, cliched love triangle with some fairly well-staged battle sequences in between. You might think trudging through the romance is worth it just for the battle scenes, but that's really not how movies work. Not to me. Pearl Harbor always seemed like a cynical attempt to make another Titanic and that's pretty much what it is. There's not an original thought in this entire movie. Like most of Bay's movies, this film did very well at the box office and was poorly received by critics. It went on to receive six Razzie nominations, although luckily for them, an even worse movie came out that year: Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered. Despite the lack of critical respect, the film was also nominated for four Academy Awards and won for Best Sound Editing. The only other film nominated for Sound Editing that year was Monsters, Inc. so there really wasn't much competition. Although, to be fair, one of those sound editors (Christopher Boyes) has won three other Oscars in his career (two for sound mixing, two for sound editing). So, obviously, that guy knows what he's doing.
