Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

Tora! Tora! Tora! is still magnificent to watch. Nearly 40 years after it was filmed, the original remains a classic war movie.

No computer graphics here or sappy love interests to spoil the story, unlike 2001's Pearl Harbor. Tora! Tora! Tora! is as much documentary as action film, with an emphasis on depicting the tension and the drama of nations on a collision course toward war.

The action shifts from Tokyo to Washington to Hawaii and back again. You can almost hear the clock ticking away as the diplomats jabber while the Japanese aircraft carriers steam toward Pearl Harbor.

The movie has a definite opinion on history, one that not everyone will agree with. Because it was an American-Japanese co-production, it's not surprising that Japan is portrayed sympathetically.

Admiral Yamamoto, the genius behind the attack, is seen as eager for peace (though we know that the Imperial Japanese Navy was not reluctant to fight the Western powers). Japanese pilots are seen as brave and humane (not the products of a fanatical military culture that had no problem with mistreating prisoners). U.S. Navy and Army commanders in Hawaii are portrayed as hapless men kept in the dark about Japanese intentions by Washington (though there was more than ample warning to have put the base on alert).

But if the history portrayed in the movie is slanted, at least it's coherent and essentially plausible. Compared to what usually passes for history in Hollywood, the movie is downright scholarly.

But the real thrill of Tora! Tora! Tora! is the special effects. Those are real airplanes twisting and diving in the stunning dogfight sequence (the Japanese planes are actually heavily modified American trainers). The aircraft carriers and battleships aren't real, but the painstaking effort to make them look real is incredible. Burning ships, exploding airplanes ... this is an epic movie. And considering how the "date that will live in infamy" changed the world, it deserved nothing less than epic treatment.