I confess I'm not that movie's biggest fan. I have, however, been forced to recognize something positive about it.
At the beginning of each semester I give the students in my U.S. military history course a brief written survey, asking them some ludicrously basic questions about the subject. (Examples:
"What is the title of the individual who serves as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces?" "Who commanded the American Continental Army during the American Revolution?" "In what year did the American Civil War end?" "Name a country the U.S. was fighting in World War I." "Which side - north or south - did the U.S. support in the Vietnam conflict?") The results of the survey invariably are depressing in the extreme - especially in view of the fact that the people taking it are college undergraduates (i.e., people with high school diplomas who, by definition, are more interested in getting educated than most of the general population). The average score on the survey is usually a D or thereabouts. (Typically, about 25 percent don't know which side the U.S. was on in Vietnam.)
Another of the questions on the survey is: "The United States entered the Second World War as a direct result of a 'sneak attack' on an American military base on December 7, 1941. What was that military base?" I started giving out that survey in about 1990, and for years the number of students who missed that question was about 20 to 25 percent. (Some interesting answers: Ft. Knox, Ft. Fisher, Ft. Sumter, Camp Lejeune, Ft. Bragg, and Valley Forge.) Then, in the spring semester of 2002, everybody in the class suddenly got that question right! The movie had been released about a month earlier. Thank you, Mr. Affleck.
In the fall semester, 2008, out of a class of 21 students, four missed that question on the survey.
"Pearl Harbor" has another distinction: it's the only war movie my wife likes better than I do. She's a high school history teacher; she says the movie makes a big impression on high school kids, who really relate to it (and, presumably, learn what Pearl Harbor was by watching it). She and I have had some interesting, and rather enthusiastic, conversations about this sort of thing. Another bone of contention is Disney's "Pocahantas." I'm a big fan of Disney animation, which I regard as one of the wonders of the world. But in historical terms that movie makes me semi-catatonic. (I can handle the concept that trees can talk and racoons can't, but I still don't understand how Yellowstone National Park, complete with mountains and waterfalls, got relocated to Tidewater Virginia. Or how Pocahantas and Mel Gibson managed to learn how to speak the same language in two minutes. Or...oh, never mind.) My wife says any movie that gets kids interested in history, and makes them want to learn more about it, can't be all bad. It's hard to argue with that logic.
Then there was the time I rented the Russian version of "War and Peace" - the one that lasts seven and a half hours. When is was over there were several minutes of silence, after which my wife said: "John, the next six movies you rent are not to have any horses, cannons, explosions, or people with names ending in A."