'Pearl Harbor' survives UK attack

LONDON, England -- They may be the reviews that live in infamy.

"Pearl Harbor" has opened in UK cinemas to a verbal carpet-bombing from British film critics aghast at what they see as the latest in a litany of Tinseltown productions to shamelessly rewrite history.

Even as the three-hour epic blockbuster pulled in three million pounds ($4.25 million) at UK box offices in its debut weekend, critics were pulling out all stops to hammer home their point.

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"Torture! Torture! Torture!" screeches The Guardian newspaper in a review that urged filmgoers to take cover from a "big, loud, dumb, boring mega-movie" that avoids any hint of the ugliness of war.

"What response is there, apart from a yelp of incredulous dismay every five minutes?" asks the reviewer, Peter Bradshaw.

"What historical insights can it offer -- apart from the blinding revelation that maybe (the film director) Steven Spielberg's 1941 wasn't quite that bad after all?"

Sounding a common refrain, British critics asserted the film perpetrates historical treachery by glossing over the embarrassment of the U.S. military defeat at Pearl Harbor and looking at America's role in the episode through glorifying, rose-coloured glasses.

"The truth is sunk," chided The Scotsman.

"It is a crude travesty of the actual events," wrote the Daily Telegraph reviewer, Andrew O'Hagan. "It is a lump of pure idiocy. It is a piece of war pornography."

The Herald called the film, which centres on a love triangle between a nurse and two soldiers, "a contemptuous, pumped-up, one note, flag-waving, shampoo-and-testosterone fabrication."

The indignation echoed the sense of wounded pride with which British critics reacted to Spielberg's Oscar -winning blockbuster about the D-Day Normandy invasion, "Saving Private Ryan."

The film, which grossed 19.2 million pounds ($27 million) in the UK, gave only a passing nod to the role of British soldiers in the sea-borne thrust that marked the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler's embattled troops.

Another recent Hollywood film, Jonathan Mostow's U-571", outraged British government officials for revising history to show American submariners seizing a top-secret German code machine. The Enigma encoder, however, was actually captured by British submariners -- before the U.S. even entered World War II in December 1941.

"Facts should be portrayed as such and when they are not, they should be shown as entertainment," British Culture Secretary Chris Smith said at the time.

"Where people tinker with historical events, that should be made absolutely clear."

But a spokeswoman for film company Buena Vista, in remarks to Reuters, said "Pearl Harbor" was performing impressively despite the critical bashing.

"Considering that the reviews have been terrible, the word-of-mouth has been very good. In the exit polls we did outside cinemas, all the feedback was positive."

She added that "Pearl Harbor" had outperformed "Armageddon" -- about an asteroid destroying Earth -- in its first UK weekend, and that Armageddon had ended up making 16.5 million pounds ($23.3 million).