The triangle involves two generically glamorous flyboys, played by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, who have been friends since Even their names, Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker, are Rafe (Affleck) falls in love with a nurse who presides over his physical named Evelyn (played by Kate Beckinsale), who is also generically Rafe and Evelyn spend the next hour or so exchanging pallid lines of dialogue that try too hard to hammer into the audience that, yes, they are in Sort of like Shakespeare or Petrarch without any brains and about four centuries too In any case, Rafe goes to Britain to fly for the Royal Air Force, where he faces serious butt-kissing from the Brits in a disgustingly patronizing depiction of both British and Americans, and gets shot down over But (who didn't see this coming) he

But Evelyn thinks he's And so does Danny (Hartnett). After the token few minutes of mourning, Danny and Evelyn fly above Hawaii and then make it like rabbits under parachutes, invoking obvious parallels to Titanic's "I'm flying" scene followed by good ol' shagging in a car More faux-sonnet dialogue Then, just like clockwork, Rafe comes back, poor Evelyn is caught in the middle, and Danny and Rafe fight Jerry Then it gets interrupted by the spectacular but oddly fake and inhuman money siphon er I mean, attack sequence characterized by CGI copies of trapped and screaming

Meanwhile, Pearl Harbor occasionally alternates to shots of somber-looking Japanese spies and soldiers planning the attack, all accompanied by evil-sounding music, going out of the way to make the Japanese look like devious souls out for revenge because America wouldn't give them their oil (convenient partial reasoning). Then, in an attempt to make the Japanese appear somewhat remorseful, the script calls for Admiral Yamamoto to utter his famous "brilliant man" and "sleeping giant"

After the attack, Jon Voight does a wonderful impression of Peter Sellers' Only problem is, he was supposed to be Franklin