Well, talk about the letdown of the summer.

Pearl Harbor roared into the public consciousness some time ago, with a humdinger of a trailer and a cast of pretty people to make just about anyone fasten on their drool-cups. There was going to be romance, explosions, and, uh, explosions. Bay and Bruckheimer, while espousing a very overblown style, never fail to entertain from beginning to end.

Until now.

I think, for starters, a story yielded from fact rather than a 15 year-old's action-junkie mind is just way out of their depth. Over-dynamic camera angles, snappy one-liners, and paint-by-numbers romance just don't have any place in a retelling of one of American history's most tragic days.

The story is simplistic enough that I had it entirely figured out months before the movie's release, just by watching the trailer. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are buddies, have been since they were children. They both like to fly (only in movies do you find people so single-mindedly devoted to something like flying). Affleck meets Beckinsale, they fall in love, everything is painted in So-Nostalgic-You-Want-To-Tear-Your-Goddamn-Eyes-Out-vision. You get the feeling you're watching an ad for the 40's -- "Wouldn't you like to live here, too?" -- rather than what the 40's were probably like.

Affleck volunteers to fly with the RAF (that's the British Royal Air Force, for the historically inept) and of course it appears that he dies overseas. Beckinsale is stationed over in Pearl Harbor with Hartnett, she gets properly tragified, and is pretty damn ready to fall into the arms of Hartnett.

This all takes place before the bombing of Pearl Harbor itself, and since you know Affleck is present in Hawaii via the previews, you know he did not really die overseas in England.

You can pretty much figure out the love-triangle tensions from there. The way it is solved is, well, silly. God bless war for making tough decisions so easily for movie people.

Now, on to the many, many flaws.

Jon Voight, in what is probably the best performance in the entire movie, nevertheless is reduced to making FDR a high school football coach. His speeches (of which there are many, some historical, some not) are voiced-over various shots of Americans looking downtrodden, the Stars 'n' Stripes flapping in the wind, children playing baseball, yadda yadda yadda. Pretty typical Bruckheimer/Bay stuff. They're of course laced with metaphors, ideals, cheap jingoism, and the kind of tone that suggests the screenwriters were a bit too full of themselves.

The Japanese. Of course the Japanese are made out to be as alien as ET, hatching their plans in a Zen Garden of War, or something to that effect. It is apparently a uniquely American trait to sit around a map in a room to plan shit out. The Japanese have half-naked guys in pools of water with long sticks pointing at seven-foot-high maps on concrete walls. White flags with Japanese calligraphy decorate everything, probably translating to stuff like "Americans are dumb" and "Long live Imperialism."

Cuba Gooding, Jr. What the hell was this guy doing in the movie? Probably lending historical credibility to the picture, as he was the only major protagonist other than FDR to actually have a historical counterpart. All the same, no purpose; he gets treated by Beckinsale after boxing, has a brief monologue talking about how unfair it is to be black in the 1940's (without ever actually using those words), then shoots some stuff, and gets his medal. He is in this movie for probably a total of 30 minutes, which in comparison to the length of the movie, isn't really all that much.

The length. This movie is 3 hours long, which is probably about 1 hour longer than a merciful God would ever allow. There's all this build-up to the bombing itself, I mean let's face it, that's why everyone's at the movie. The funny part is, the bombing is only about halfway into the movie, and there's still upwards of an hour and a half of stuff taking place afterwards. Nobody really cares anymore, but I absolutely do not walk out of movies, so I sat through the rest of it. Plus, I was my friends' ride, I couldn't ditch 'em.

The cool shoot-'em-up stuff, and the bombing. The dog-fighting is all right. Strictly all right. The bombing of Pearl Harbor is thrilling, but I swear to god some footage was used more than once during the entire sequence. Throughout the entire movie I felt queerly detached, as if I was watching a preview rather than an actual film, and nowhere is this more saddening than during the bombing. Not because I should connect with the movie -- not at all. But because I should connect with the event. I could not.

The score. You know something's wrong if I think to say something bad about the score. I swear to you, and this has been corroborated by several others, the score to this movie is the Gladiator score, spiced with a few pieces from Titanic, complete with song by popular female vocalist (Faith Hill, in place of Celine Dion) over the credits.

Have I gone on long enough? No, I'm nowhere near finished with this movie, but for the sake of my limited readership I shall cease now. Suffice to say this movie is a letdown in all kinds of ways, of which I've only begun to touch upon in this review. It's hip to hate Pearl Harbor -- newspapers and magazines are still running hate-mail and critiques about the movie, pretty typical of any summer fx flick that garners even just a little financial success (Phantom Menace, ID4, and their ilk come to mind). I saw this movie the Tuesday before it came out at a special sneak screening, before any reviews were published, and my loathing of the film was borne of that night, not by the influence of others.

Avoid.