Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett) run for cover, and a fighter plane, during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

There were no winners at Pearl Harbor. Only survivors.

  And that’s just at the movie.

  Michael Bay’s mammoth, mega-hyped World War II epic is a sprawling mess of a film that tries to marry the wartime gravitas of Saving PrivateRyan with the romantic sweep of Titanic but reaches neither film’s level. And that’s saying something, considering that neither film was really that great. Big, yeah, powerful in some kind of cinematic scope, sure, but not truly great films.

  Pearl Harbor does have some great parts, but only because, with $145 million, there’d damn sure better be something going on here. The battle scenes are spectacularly (if overly) mounted. And there’s a neat little romantic triangle going on with the leads that mildly keeps the interest. But for something so big, one can’t help feel that there’s no emotional core here.

  Not content to simply acknowledge that we got our asses kicked and leave it at that, Bay chooses to end the film with a bombing raid over Tokyo. Known as the Doolittle Raid, the raid was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s answer to the attack in order to boost American morale. But here, it only feels like a half-hearted attempt to manipulate the viewer and lessen the magnitude of the tragedy.

  Bay, working with a cliche-riddled script by Oscar-nominated Randall Wallace (Braveheart), mainly tries to set up the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the backdrop for a sweeping romantic triangle between two boyhood chums turned fighter pilots, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), and nurse Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). (McCawley and Walker are very loosely based on real-life flying aces George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, who are credited with six of the 29 Japanese planes shot down – out of more than 350 in the air – during the attack.)

  Once the brotherhood bond is established between Rafe and Danny, Evelyn is introduced, and she and Rafe fall madly in love. Why? Beats me. Rafe, not unlike Affleck, is cocky as hell, and their connection is rather loosely developed. Before you know it, Rafe’s off to join a special wing of Great Britain’s Royal Air Force that took in Americans and others who wanted to fight before the U.S. jumped into the war. He leaves behind a resentful Danny (whom he’s protected from harm all his life) and a heartbroken Evelyn (whom he’s known for a coupla weeks).

  After Danny and Evelyn are shipped off to Pearl Harbor, they learn that Rafe has been shot down during the Battle of Britain and presumed dead. Or is he? Seeking to move on with their lives, they decide the best thing to do is to fall in love so that when Rafe eventually shows up just in time for the Japanese attack, the entanglements can ensue.

  Cute, but epic? Not really. Thankfully by then, we’re ready for the real entanglement, which despite Bay’s typical passion for very, very, very loud scenes (Armageddon, The Rock) really does capture at least some of the scope of the assault. Japanese "Zeroes" continually pound the Harbor and neighboring airfields with torpedoes, bombs and bullets. Crewmen are strafed, blown up and drowned. It truly feels like the relentless moment that it must have been. And as gruesome as the big scene is, it doesn’t begin to match the gratuitousness of Steven Spielberg’s gorefest in the opening 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. May also gets points for showing Evelyn’s role in desperately tending to the wounded, giving more heft to her character.

  But the three leads struggle mightily to help match the drama and trauma of battle with their love story. But while Affleck remains one of the most overrated actors (and biggest poser) in Hollywood, this is Hartnett’s chance to shine. Like every other actor here, he’s not given much dialogue to work with, but he makes up for it by embracing a shy character filled with uncertainty and nuancing it. When Danny and Evelyn find themselves switching from comforting to flirting, we forget that Rafe ever existed. And when he returns, Danny wins the popularity contest hands down, thanks to Hartnett’s James Dean-like vulnerability.

  Elsewhere, Jon Voight turns in a dead-on impersonation of President Roosevelt, Alec Baldwin (as Doolittle) spouts his testosterone-drenched cliches with gusto, and even Dan Aykroyd has a moment or two as the alarmist Captain Thurman. Cuba Gooding Jr., however, is all but wasted as a cook who made history by saving crewmates and gunning down enemy aircraft.

  For a gripping, historically accurate version of the attack, check out 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), directed by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku. A special DVD version just came out two weeks ago in time for Pearl’s premiere, and is a landmark in its cooperation between Japanese and American film crews telling both sides of this compelling story.

  But with Michael Bay hell-bent on making his film sink or swim on its romance, Pearl Harbor can do nothing but what so many ships did that fateful day. .