Remember Pearl Harbor? Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay didn’t bother to.

Despite its Memorial Day weekend release, their Pearl Harbor cares little for history. A person who knows anything at all about the Japanese sneak attack will most likely not learn anything new from this film about the actual events of the war.

What’s more, the details of this recounting of December 7, 1941 are presented so histrionically, and so often falsely, that even if some of them are true I’d guess that most people will assume that they are not.

For example, the Japanese conducted their attack at 8:00 on a Sunday morning, yet on their flight across Hawaii we see them buzzing low over the heads of a group kids playing baseball and a woman hanging up laundry (so she got up to start the washing at what, 5?).

The mildly poignant visual contrast in these scenes is not near enough to convince me that Hawaiians in the forties were such go-getters.

After the attack, we are told that the Japanese lost only 27 planes, yet the movie’s two heroes account for seven downs all by themselves, four of which are cartoonily accomplished by tricking the enemy pilots into crashing into each other.

It’s not that taking dramatic license necessarily discredits a historical picture’s sense of authenticity, but the fact that such over-the-top theatrics are the norm in Pearl Harbor suggests that factuality and even plausibility are constantly being compromised for the interests of Hollywood.

Which is not to say that this is an entertaining movie. It is weighed down by a truly bland love triangle between pilots Danny (Josh Hartnett) and Rafe (Ben Affleck), and Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), an army nurse.

Evelyn comes to love both Danny and Rafe and is perfectly happy to be with whichever of them happens to be the least dead. Her ambivalence is unsurprising considering that the movie hardly bothers to distinguish between the two.

Danny and Rafe are both farm-bred men of action, with ace piloting skills, irresistible awkward romantic charisma, and a penchant for rule-breaking (why can’t movie protagonists that work for the government ever follow regulations?). I suspect that viewers will tend to want Evelyn to end up with Rafe, since he’s played by a star, but beyond that I found no significant criteria of distinction.

Luckily for Evelyn, the choice is made for her. Killing off one of the heroes is the easy and hugely obvious way for the filmmakers to avoid getting mired up in the true challenges of romance and bring closure to what is, after all, a meaningless love story. Which one will survive? Who cares, so long as one of them dies?

The war that comes along does an excellent job of releasing any romantic tension that generous viewers bothered to accumulate, but it doesn,t do so in any remotely interesting way.

In this film, war sheds no light on love, and love sheds no light on war. For some reason they are intertwined, but they lack any sort of synergy. Of course, synergy or no, watching stuff blow up can be fun, and the Japanese attack comes as a welcome and none-to-soon relief from the bland romance.

In fact, since so little attention is paid to historical compellations and characterizations, I suspect that viewers will cheer on the onset of the Pearl Harbor bombing merely as a way to make the movie more interesting.

And to be sure, when the attack finally does arrive, itdelivers big on all sorts of recycled action movie favorites: Star Wars-style dogfights, people clinging to capsizing boats, al la Titanic, and just the sort of general large-scale death and destruction that the genre has led us to expect to the point of numbness. I must admit, if you give points based on a total devastation-scale, Pearl Harbor probably scores pretty well.

Since the filmmakers probably wanted to end the film on a winning note, and since all three sides of the love triangle are still troublesomely alive at the end of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Doolittle counterstrike on Tokyo is also included as the conclusion, dragging the film on past the 2 hour point.

Since the Japanese are portrayed very delicately and infrequently throughout the movie, it is hard to care too much about the success of the revenge mission based merely on the depictions in the movie.

If you thought the Japanese’s actions were cowardly and cruel before the movie you might take satisfaction in the depiction of the Doolittle raid.

If you thought the Japanese had little choice in their actions you will probably find it a sad, if necessary, consequence of war – an illustration of revenge psychology. But, neither of these reactions will be elicited by the movie.

If you react to the final scenes at all, it will be to wonder which one of the fly boys will sacrifice himself to save the other one and at long last bring the drawn out love saga to an end.

The events of Pearl Harbor and WWII are such colossuses in America’s collective consciousness that the movie occasionally triggers a sense of reverence by its mere association with them, but it certainly doesn’t earn any noble sentiment on its own merits.

In and of itself Pearl Harbor inspires askew stares, basic morbid fascination and boredom, boredom, boredom.