Director: Michael Bay*
Cast: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr.
Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I honestly can’t remember if I saw the film in theaters or later on home video. Considering in the the theater would be May of 2001, and on disc would have been December 2001, the movie would have played distinctly different in the spread of that half a year.
Do I have a memory of seeing it before? Not even in the slightest.
What could possibly go wrong?
Did I Like It: I’m about a minute and a half into this film when I first role my eyes, and I know I’m in for a long three hours. Another three minutes or so and I’m treated to the two main characters as children accidentally launching into flight in a crop duster. Between this and Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), was there a rash of kids accidentally taking flight in the late 1990s/early 2000s? I don’t remember that being a thing? Incidentally, I had enough material fro a review inside of the first half hour. Maybe I’ll add to it as the film proceeds**.
The movie proceeds from there positively groaning to strike a balance between Armageddon (1998)-style bombast and a legitimate docudrama about the world of 1941.
Guess which mode wins out?
Okay, so, at some point in the near future I’m going to have to build the skill of finding nice things to say about bad movies. It’s probably time to start here. Jennifer Garner is a delight as the nerdy, uptight friend of Kate Beckinsale. She should have been the lead, but she’s far more interesting in her few minutes of screen time than any of the other eye-candy women we have here.
That probably says more me than anything else, so I’ll just leave it there.
But let’s get back to a far more pertinent or profound question: Is there a rational reason to watch this film, when From Here to Eternity (1953) is perfectly available? If you’ve got an answer, then I will wait patiently for it.
And, no, “one is in black & white, and the other is in color” is definitely not a valid reason, in case you were wondering.
*I originally typed that as “Michael Nay” and got a deep enough chuckle out of that, it’s a solid bet it’s more entertaining than the rest of the film.
**I did(n’t?). For any of my other thoughts, probably best to go lookat my Letterboxd review. Haven’t we gone on long enough about this one?