Pearl Harbor/YMMV

Crowning Music of Awesome: The scene after the attack with the lone trumpet playing and the main theme in the background is extremely awesome.
Ensemble Darkhorse: Many viewers found Danny's pilot buddies (especially Goose and Red), and Evelyn's fellow nurses, a lot more interesting than the central trio.
Misblamed: Michael Bay did not cause everything wrong with this movie. He's not entirely blameless, but just as much is the fault of the writer, producer, and the studio.
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.
Romantic Plot Tumor: Veterans from the attack were criticizing the film for both this trope and the inaccuracies.
- Roger Ebert wrote this summary of the movie:

"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."

They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: If Bay had simply been allowed to remake Tora! Tora! Tora!, it might have turned out a lot better, even if nowhere near a masterpiece. Shots such as the planes flying from behind the camera, and the first bomb being dropped, give an idea of what could have been.
Trapped by Mountain Lions: Maybe forty-five minutes of the film is the actual Battle of Pearl Harbor.
Vindicated by History: Narrowly averted. This movie came out in the summer of 2001, and was critically roasted, doing poorly (by Bruckheimer/Bay standards) at the box office. That autumn, a change in attitudes resulted in this movie attracting much warmer notices when it was released on video. Since then, however, people have once again come to think poorly of it.
Wall Banger: Enough for a page of their own.

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