Critical response On
Rotten Tomatoes,
Pearl Harbor holds an approval rating of 24% based on 194 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "
Pearl Harbor tries to be the
Titanic of war movies, but it's just a tedious romance filled with laughably bad dialogue. The 40-minute action sequence is spectacular though." On
Metacritic, the film has a score of 44 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by
CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A−" on scale of A to F.
Chicago Sun-Times critic
Roger Ebert gave the film one and a half stars, writing: "
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. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them." Ebert also criticized the liberties the film took with historical facts: "There is no sense of history, strategy or context; according to this movie, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because America cut off its oil supply, and they were down to an 18-month reserve. Would going to war restore the fuel sources? Did they perhaps also have imperialist designs? Movie doesn't say." In his later "Great Movies" essay on
Lawrence of Arabia, Ebert likewise wrote, "What you realize watching
Lawrence of Arabia is that the word 'epic' refers not to the cost or the elaborate production, but to the size of the ideas and vision.
Werner Herzog's
Aguirre, the Wrath of God didn't cost as much as the catering in
Pearl Harbor, but it is an epic, and
Pearl Harbor is not." Ed Gonzalez of
Slant Magazine gave the film one out of four stars and wrote, "Middlingly racist, humorless, and downright inept,
Pearl Harbor is solely for fans of
fireworks factories."
A. O. Scott of
The New York Times wrote, "Nearly every line of the script drops from the actors' mouths with the leaden clank of exposition, timed with bad sitcom beats." Mike Clark of
USA Today gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "Ships, planes and water combust and collide in
Pearl Harbor, but nothing else does in one of the wimpiest wartime romances ever filmed." In his review for
The Washington Post,
Desson Howe wrote, "although this
Walt Disney movie is based, inspired and even partially informed by a real event referred to as Pearl Harbor, the movie is actually based on the movies
Top Gun,
Titanic and
Saving Private Ryan. Don't get confused."
Peter Travers of
Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale – a British actress without a single worthy line to wrap her credible American accent around – are attractive actors, but they can't animate this moldy romantic triangle."
Time magazine's
Richard Schickel criticized the love triangle: "It requires a lot of patience for an audience to sit through the dithering. They're nice kids and all that, but they don't exactly claw madly at one another. It's as if they know that someday they're going to be part of "the Greatest Generation" and don't want to offend
Tom Brokaw. Besides, megahistory and personal history never integrate here." Robert W. Butler of
The Kansas City Star wrote, "The dialogue is so unrelentingly banal as to make one reconsider whether
James Cameron's writing on
Titanic was really all that bad."
Entertainment Weekly was more positive, giving the film a "B−" rating, and
Owen Gleiberman praised the Pearl Harbor attack sequence: "Bay's staging is spectacular but also honorable in its scary, hurtling exactitude. ... There are startling point-of-view shots of torpedoes dropping into the water and speeding toward their targets, and though Bay visualizes it all with a minimum of graphic carnage, he invites us to register the terror of the men standing helplessly on deck, the horrifying split-second deliverance as bodies go flying and explosions reduce entire battleships to liquid walls of collapsing metal." In his review for
The New York Observer,
Andrew Sarris wrote, "here is the ironic twist in my acceptance of
Pearl Harbor – the parts I liked most are the parts before and after the digital destruction of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese carrier planes" and felt that "
Pearl Harbor is not so much about
World War II as it is about movies about World War II. And what's wrong with that?" Critics in Japan received the film more positively than in most countries with one likening it to
Gone with the Wind set during World War II and another describing it as more realistic than
Tora! Tora! Tora! Accolades The film was nominated for four
Academy Awards, winning in the category of
Best Sound Editing. It was also nominated for six
Golden Raspberry Awards, including
Worst Picture. This marked the first occurrence of a Worst Picture-nominated film winning an Academy Award; it is also the only film directed by Bay to win an Academy Award. ==Historical accuracy==