The Doolittle Raid, April 1942, was the most interesting part

PEARL HARBOR has a mini-movie attached at the end, the Doolittle Raid.

It was an audacious counterstrike at the Japanese so soon after the Pearl Harbor catastrophe and the April defeat of the Anglo-American-Dutch at Java. The Doolittle Raid rattled the Japanese and altered the course of the war. It compelled the Japanese to launch another major strike across the northern Pacific to capture Midway Island and probably the Hawaiian Islands if victorious. If successful the American first line of defense in the Pacific would have been pushed back to the West Coast. But instead the Japanese fell into an American ambush at Midway, losing four of their irreplaceable fleet carriers and hundreds of irreplaceable, experienced Navy fighter and bomber pilots. From then on Japan was on the defensive until the bitter end in 1945.

I enjoyed this part of the movie the most. In fact I wished it was longer.

There was a 1944 movie, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo", which detailed the entire raid. What I like about that movie is that the director accidentally or inadvertently invented the 'point of view' camera angle. During the B-25 bomber flight over Japanese coastal land the filing camera is in the back of the cockpit. You start getting a feeling that you're in the cockpit sitting behind the pilot and copilot looking out over the onrushing Japanese landscape. Even in black and white you still get that 'interactive ride rush'. Imagine if it was in color. Unfortunately the 2001 Pearl Harbor movie did not duplicate that effect.

I'm one of the few people that liked PEARL HARBOR. I just can't figure out what the naysayers wanted from this movie. It was entertaining.