Clichés flew like machine gun bullets as we endured barrage after barrage of emotional mush flung trebuchet-like from a script which seemed to be put together by marketing researchers. For about 90 minutes we repelled veritable wave attacks of boyhood buddies, dashing young fighter pilots, and spunky heroines in love as they attempted to infiltrate our hearts. What can we say, as portrayed by Hollywood, romance is hell.

In one scene, fighter pilot Rafe (Ben Affleck) takes nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) on a bizarre date to a wobbly platform suspended from the side of the Queen Mary at anchor in New York Harbor. We didn't think it was possible to mess up physics in a romance scene, but this movie proves us wrong. Rafe sets the ratchet latch to the up position on a hand cranked pulley system and miraculously, the platform rises with no cranking. In fact, the ropes don't even move through the pulleys. Later, Rafe (ever the hotshot pilot) clumsily trips the release and the platform plunges downward until it's partially submerged. This was a hackneyed oh-gosh-we're-soaked-let's-take-our-clothes-off gimmick, but the movie makers couldn't even get this right. Rafe and Evelyn arrive at her hotel completely dry and Rafe chivalrously leaves Evelyn at the entrance.

Finally, the Japanese attack. At last, projectile motion! Then Hollywood drops the ultimate physics bomb. The special effects animators in their effort to dramatically portray the bomb's deadly descent do a bang up job of reinforcing the major misconception that horizontally released bombs fall straight down. When a bomb is released it has the same velocity as the aircraft. When the velocity is horizontal, the bomb will travel a considerable distance forward as it descends. The bomb will remain nearly horizontal for much of its flight and its nose will tilt downward slowly. In the movie, when the bomb is released, it immediately turns its nose earthward and falls straight down until it crashes through the deck of the Arizona. This was a scene which shall live forever in movie physics infamy.

Meanwhile, our fighter pilot heroes scramble to find flyable aircraft. Fortunately, they own a magic convertible to convey them on their quest. They are strafed by a zero as they drive wildly toward a remote air field. The zero would have carried two 7.7 mm machine guns spitting out 33 rounds per second, not to mention a pair of 20 mm cannons slamming home 17 rounds per second designed to rip holes through armored plating. The cannon and machine gun bullets would have been a mix of tracer, incendiary, armor piercing, and high explosive rounds specifically intended for blasting apart air frames and exploding gas tanks. Ironically, movie cars are often blown up in an unrealistic manner by a single handgun bullet to the gas tank. In this movie the car's trunk and windshield are riddled with bullet holes. Yet, our heroes drive off without so much as a scratch or a flat tire.

When hapless sailors are strafed in the water, machine gun bullets strike in evenly spaced rows perfectly aligned with the strafing zero's wing-mounted cannons. In reality the cannons would have been set to converge at a few hundred yards rather than shoot straight ahead. This, along with cannon vibration, would have tended to break up the perfectly spaced linear patterns. Our movie makers were so intent on perpetuating this movie misconception that they also ignored the zero's two 7.7 mm nose-mounted machine guns. These would have fired directly ahead between the cannon shots.

The movie attempts to give us realism by mixing in characters based on actual heroes like Dorie Miller (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.). At one point Gooding steps up to a pair of 20 mm cannons and begins blasting away at zeros flying between his ship and another ship no more than 100 yards away. Apparently, the movie makers considered dual 20 mm cannons more photographic than the 50 cal machine gun the real Dorie Miller fired. However, they didn't think about the fact that the cannons were aimed directly at the other ship. This would have raked the ship with tracer and incendiary bullets from end to end. However, not a single bullet could be seen striking the ship.

Most writers would throw up their hands at the thought of trying to create a feel-good ending to the most tragic defeat in American history, but not our movie making marketeers. They have the movie's heroic group of Pearl Harbor fighter pilots reassigned to the ultimate morale-boosting publicity stunt, Jimmy Doolittle's B-25 bomber raid on Japan. (Evidently, we're supposed to think there was a shortage of bomber pilots for the job.) Doolittle's group then goes on to heroically resolve the movie's love triangle and drop a few bombs on the Japanese in the process. We even might have cared if it hadn't taken three hours to reach the conclusion and if the movie's physics hadn't been bombed along the way.