To try and write about Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor as a movie is to miss the point entirely. It was designed to be an event, a spectacle. Like Titanic and Independence Day before it, it will be a blockbuster, that's a given. And I can tell you that the $140-million spent on making it is pretty much all up there on the screen-because the filmmakers certainly didn't waste any money on the script.

Like Titanic and the more recent Enemy at the Gates, Pearl Harbor tries to make a historic tragedy more palatable to general audiences by using the event in question as the backdrop for a romance, in this case between Ben Affleck's flying ace Rafe and nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale). Rafe and best buddy Danny (Josh Hartnett) have been meant to fly almost from birth it seems, as a cloying opening scene set in 1923 Tennessee suggests by showing the two young boys accidentally starting up and flying Rafe's daddy's crop-dusting plane.

Cut to 1941. Our good old boys are all grown up, handsome as hell and raring to use their flying skills against the Hun. But America hasn't entered the war at this point, so they bide their time performing stunts in their planes, annoying their superiors and chasing nurses. Enter Evelyn, a wholesome, raven-haired beauty. Rafe and Evelyn fall in love, almost by rote, and then Rafe volunteers to go to England to fly for the RAF (insert black-and-white period footage while voiceover intones "The German Luftwaffe relentlessly bombs downtown London." Downtown?). After the kind of saccharine correspondence between Rafe and Evelyn that makes a Hallmark card seem like Eliot, Rafe is shot down and killed. Evelyn and Danny mourn and then fall in love-and have sex, ludicrously filmed amidst a hangar full of silk parachutes. But wait! Rafe is alive and well, showing up in Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941, to learn that his buddy and best girl are in love. All pre-Pearl Harbor innocence flies out the window, just in time for the event that killed American innocence once and for all-or so the filmmakers would have you believe.

At the point that Admiral Yamamoto's planes take off for the infamous sneak attack, we are 90 minutes into the three-hour film. The attack-wherein the whole of the American fleet was demolished or damaged, and thousands were killed, including the 1177 men who went to the bottom on the USS Arizona-takes up the following 30 minutes of screen time and it is a devastating half-hour to watch. Suffice it to say that the special effects are what you'd expect and the carnage is brought home with a genuine forcefulness. The horrible aftermath-men trapped underwater, bodies floating everywhere-brings to mind the paintings of Bosch.

The final hour details America's plan to fight back, which at first consists of a risky scheme to bomb Tokyo, more of a morale booster for the American people than a strategically important mission. Naturally Rafe and Danny are there, led by Alec Baldwin's Captain Doolittle, who actually utters the following: "You know, Jack, we may lose this battle, but we'll win this war..." One of the boys isn't going to come back, of course. Guess which one?

Resolutely jingoistic, Pearl Harbor is old-fashioned, conservative filmmaking (is Rafe's dyslexia an homage to Dubya, perhaps?) that will, of course, make every American proud and rake in gobs of cash at the same time. Talk about your manifest destiny...