Both overall director Richard Fleischer and his Japanese counterparts do a dull job, and the monotonously low-key tone of scene after scene almost suggests that each was filmed without a sense of ultimate slotting in the finished form.

This big-budget, noble-but-dull account of the run up to Pearl Harbour is high on historical veracity but low on drama.

The climax, in particular, manages to be more than just a shoot-out, with Fleischer's intelligent direction generating a real feeling of chaos and apocalypse.

…what Fleischer’s film excels at is spectacle; the last hour of the film, from the interval onwards, is an absolute destruct-athon… the big explosions feel somehow like a Godzilla movie without Godzilla, a sanitised fantasy based on a real-world atrocity.