YMMV / Pearl Harbor

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Some fans liked to believe that Danny is bisexual and secretly in love with his childhood friend Rafe. The chemistry between the two actors helps.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: It may seemed odd and even silly that a sailor's crying out that he can't swim, but back then, swimming wasn't taught to decrease the number of restrictions.
• Ending Fatigue: The movie could have ended perfectly with the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack and the brief montage of the heroes who warded off the Japanese. Instead, the movie goes on for another 30 minutes of Danny and Rafe participating in the US Military's raid on Tokyo, Danny dying and Rafe raising his son after presumably marrying Evelyn.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Many viewers found Danny's pilot buddies (especially Goose and Red), and Evelyn's fellow nurses, a lot more interesting than the central trio.
  • Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character Dorie Miller, the cook who went on to be the first African-American to win the Navy Cross, was also seen as much more interesting. It probably helps that, unlike the main cast, he was based on a real person. Even the “Pearl Harbor Sucks” song from Team America: World Police says “he’s way better than Ben Affleck” and wishes he had a bigger part.
  • Admiral Isoroku Yamamato; he doesn't have many scenes, but is portrayed in a far more human light than many of his comrades are in spite of the film's questionable tone; the fact that he is played by the late Mako Iwamatsu has certainly won him many fans as well.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Betty's death during the eponymous battle is one that some people work hard not to acknowledge.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Doolittle telling his men to become heroic kamikazes if they run out of munition. Tasteless in a movie where the villains are World War II-era Japanese, it only got worse when 9/11 happened less than four months after release.
• Ho Yay: There's rather a lot of it between Danny and Rafe, to the degree that some fans imagine that Danny is secretly in love with Rafe rather than Evelyn.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Kate Beckinsale was ordered to lose weight by Michael Bay due to some unflattering leather trousers she wore to her screen test.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many viewers just want to see the titular Pearl Harbor attack, without caring about the love triangle the film focuses on.
• Misblamed: Michael Bay did not cause everything that went wrong with this movie. He's not entirely blameless, but several factors point to writer Randall Wallace, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and the studio, just as much, if not more, than Bay. Numerous accounts of severe Executive Meddling caused more than one instance of Bay being on the verge of leaving production altogether.
• Narm:
  • The infamous "I think World War II just started", to the point of being edited out of subsequent releases. It started with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
  • Colonel Doolittle pointing at Rafe and Danny and calling them "the men that will win this war" using these specific words—as if they needed any more Character Shilling. It's a line that might have been less ridiculous with a more broad phrasing.
  • Danny's death scene is so chocked with Inelegant Blubbering that it makes the whole thing downright laughable instead of tragic. The fact that his and Rafe's supposed friendship was never truly fleshed out in the movie — being a textbook case of telling rather than showing — certainly doesn't help.
  • As a Navy ship begins to tip over and sink, one of the sailors yells out, "I can't swim!" It can be brushed off as historically accurate, since sailors were not required to swim and survivors claimed to have heard people saying it, but it feels like a random non-sequitur in the movie.
  • Then there is Boston-born Ben Affleck and Minnesota native Josh Hartnett affecting two of the worst fake Southern accents committed to celluloid. The budget of this movie definitely went into the VFX and not into a dialect coach.
• Nightmare Fuel: The scenes of the crews inside the Pacific Fleet's ships as they fill up with water with them all trapped inside. There's also the hospital scene, with people screaming in pain from burns and bullet wounds to the point where even the doctors and nurses are on the verge of having a Heroic BSoD.
• One-Scene Wonder: Cuba Gooding Jr. is destined to do this. During the attack he plays a cook who mans a machine gun and downs several enemy planes. This was based on Real Life.
• Retroactive Recognition: Several, such as Michael Shannon, Jaime King, and the future Mrs. Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Critics and veterans from the attack trashed the film for this as much as the inaccuracies, with Roger Ebert summarizing it as "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 Scrappy: Rafe is widely hated by viewers for being an arrogant, nonstop jerkass with a lot of It's All About Me moments and despite still having some good friendship moments with Danny, has quite the Toxic Friend Influence on him. And even to the point viewers don't seem to understand why others keep talking awesome about him to the high skies. And despite having a I Want My Beloved to Be Happy moment, viewers don't think better at him at all.
• Stock Footage Failure: The montage at the beginning, set 1939-40, shows an M26 Pershing tank in Cologne. The M26 arrived in Europe in 1945, and wasn't even on the drawing board by 1940.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • If Bay had simply been allowed to remake Tora! Tora! Tora! with modern CGI effects, as Word of God says he wanted to, it probably would have turned out a lot better. Shots such as the planes flying from behind the camera, and the first bomb being dropped, give an idea of what could have been.
  • Even people who don't like Titanic and its romantic leads must admit that they did fulfill the purpose of introducing the ship, locations within, other passengers, and even demographics of the era (Jack is a Bohemian artist, Rose a Philadelphia heiress, etc). With the passengers, this had the double purpose of making audiences care for them and their fates later on. This does not happen in Pearl Harbor because the main trio is barely involved with the base or other characters that are not each other (in fact, Rafe and Danny aren't even in PH when the attack begins), so even when their friends and colleagues die, it falls flat.
  • In the movie, the only trace of Hawaii's Asian-origin population (highest in the Union) and the fears of Japanese fifth-columnism it sparked (which led to the internment of citizens of Japanese origin in the U.S. and Canada) is one Asian-American doctor trying to treat a scared soldier while he keeps pushing and calling him a "Jap".
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Reviews noted that Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale "do what they can with lines", and both would later earn critical acclaim in other works. Josh Hartnett also falls into this category as apparently Michael Bay got extremely "annoyed" at Hartnett's "serious" method of acting to the point where in response to Hartnett smiling on camera he yelled out a remark about "photocopying" that smile and keeping it off camera on set.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Maybe forty-five minutes of the film is the actual Battle of Pearl Harbor.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Rafe is disliked by some viewers to the point of being considered The Scrappy for being overly cocky, hot-tempered and downright unlikeable. It's not helped by the other characters going on about how wonderful and talented he is.
  • Evelyn has been described as a flat, almost sociopathic character who thinks little of changing men as soon as they die (or seem to).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Battle of Pearl Harbor itself, and any of the (few) scenes that involve air battles, in which those visual effects were done at ILM!

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