Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Celia A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Hitchcoc It takes some courage to take an event that is such a wound to the psyche of the American people and give it an alternative perspective. This is not to accept the motivations of the Japanese Empire, but it gives a reasons for why Pearl Harbor happened. I'm hoping that contemporary society doesn't use the insipid movie "Pearl Harbor" as a benchmark for an understanding of this event. We all know that at some point, someone dropped the ball. It would have been surprising if someone had not. There were too many cooks and an arrogance that left the door open. Through some excellent research, the producers have allowed us inside the planning stages that led to the bombing. There was plenty of warning. There were just too many layers here. As this film goes along it accomplishes what every film aspires to. It makes us think we are watching actual historical figures in action, in a kind of documentary.

gavin6942 A dramatization of the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor and the series of American blunders that allowed it to happen.The Japanese side was initially to be directed by Akira Kurosawa, who worked on script development and pre-production for two years. But after two weeks of shooting, he was replaced by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, who directed the Japanese sections. What would have been different? Roger Ebert felt that Tora! Tora! Tora! was "one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made" and suffered from not having "some characters to identify with." In addition, he criticized the film for poor acting and special effects in his 1970 review. Vincent Canby, reviewer for The New York Times, was similarly unimpressed, noting the film was "nothing less than a $25-million irrelevancy." Now, I can see where Ebert and Canby are coming from. Indeed, it is long, and has no "main" character. From the point of view that movies are entertainment, this is not a good movie. But I think the film has somehow transcended that. I first saw it in school as a way to be introduced to Pearl Harbor and World War II. Did I fully comprehend what I saw? No. And is it 100% accurate? Probably not. But it still makes a great teaching aid and offers many jumping-off points.

James Hitchcock It is doubtless a good thing that Michael Bay was not around in 1970. If he had been, "Tora! Tora! Tora!" might have ended up as a bloated three- hour epic about a love-triangle involving Admiral Yamamoto, Admiral Kimmel and Tokyo Rose, with the attack on Pearl Harbor tacked on as an afterthought.Fortunately, he wasn't. The film we actually have takes a very different approach to that taken in Bay's "Pearl Harbor". There are no fictional love stories, indeed virtually no fictional characters at all. Rather, the film documents the Japanese preparations for the attack and the efforts of the Americans to understand what the Japanese were planning. The title (meaning Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!) is the Japanese code-word used to indicate a successful attack.Although some well-known Hollywood names took part, including Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten and Jason Robards, there are no real star parts; this is very much an ensemble cast. One thing that struck me was how little James Whitmore, who plays Admiral William F. Halsey, resembled Robert Mitchum, who played the same role in "Midway" from a few years later; neither actor, in fact, looked much like the real Halsey. Any actor playing a major wartime army commander such as Patton or Montgomery would no doubt be carefully made up to resemble the man he was playing, but naval commanders seem to have been much less well-known to the public than their military counterparts, so such realism was presumably thought unnecessary. In many ways the film does not address the most interesting question about the attack, namely the question of why the Japanese leadership decided to take such a reckless gamble in the first place. Emperor Hirohito never appears, and General Tojo only appears briefly. The Japanese part of the film concentrates upon Admiral Yamamoto and his predecessor Admiral Yoshida, both of whom opposed war with the United States. It is implied that some Japanese leaders considered the Americans to be a spiritually corrupt, cowardly nation who would be unwilling to carry on fighting once their Pacific Fleet had been destroyed. It is also implied that the Japanese suspected the Americans of plotting an aggressive war against their country, especially after the Pacific Fleet was moved to Pearl Harbor from its normal base in San Diego, and therefore began planning a pre-emptive strike of their own. The film, however, never comes down definitively in favour of either explanation, possibly because it was an American–Japanese co-production and the Japanese film-makers might have been unwilling to explore their country's responsibility for the war in too much detail.The film is more interesting when considering events from the American viewpoint. Contrary to popular opinion, the attack did not come as a complete surprise. The Americans suspected the possibility of a Japanese attack, having deciphered a key Japanese code which allowed them to read diplomatic communications. Remarkably, the Americans actually fired the first shots of the day when a U.S. destroyer sank a Japanese submarine trying to enter Pearl Harbor, but reports of this incident were not passed to senior commanders while more junior officers awaited official confirmation.The film, in fact, tries to rehabilitate the reputations of Admiral Husband Kimmel (I wonder if Mrs Kimmel ever used to refer to "my husband Husband") and General Walter Short, the two officers who were made scapegoats for the disaster. The Americans certainly had enough information to anticipate the attack, but owing to a combination of incompetence and mischance this information was not passed to the two commanders on the ground until it was too late. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck" described the film as taking a "revisionist approach" which showed "what really happened on December 7, 1941".None of the many individuals depicted here emerge as really interesting characters; I suspect that this is more a film for the military or history buff than for the general viewer. As such, however, it works very well, and the action scenes showing the attack are extremely realistic; the aerial dogfight sequences will bear comparison with those in "The Battle of Britain" from the previous year. I greatly prefer the sober, documentary approach taken by Zanuck and director Richard Fleischer to Bay's overblown, turgid love-story. 7/10

Geoffrey DeLeons I just watched this movie (3rd or 4th time) again last night, and I was shocked to read that it was made in 1970. The sophistication of the screenplay is such that I thought it was from the mid-eighties, at least. The multitude of human, social factors involved in the U.S. failure and the Japanese (partial) success is given due consideration in the movie, as scenes with numerous political and military figures on both sides characterize the forces involved that lead inevitably to the attack. The screenplay is thorough, relentless and intelligent. To make-simple and accessible a very tangled situation with many cross-currents and short circuits is a testament to the skill of the producers of this movie. I was very impressed that the producers were able to somehow manage scenes with period-correct ships and aircraft. I did not know there were that many Zero's, Kate's and P-40B's airworthy back in 1970. I'm not sure how they did it. The scenes on the runway are some of the most thrilling I have ever seen in cinema. I need to say that I think more time should have been devoted to the sailors trapped below decks. I know there was a fleeting scene where-in someone yelled "The hatch is jammed", but there should have been more, considering, perhaps especially, the travail of those trapped inside the U.S.S. Oklahoma and the massive effort conducted to liberate them. An important movie, both historically and cinematically.