Incoherent, jingoistic, timid, naive and ultimately inconsequential, Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Eisner's Disneyfication of the "day that will live in infamy"—the Japanese Imperial Army's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the U.S. into World War II—is as emotionally dishonest as a studio profit-and-loss statement.

In a recent New York Times profile, in which the journalist describes Bay in uncomfortably worshipful and adoring terms, the "movie-star handsome" director of "The Rock" and "Armageddon" responds to critics and how they write of his work: "It's only a movie." Um, correction, Michael: It's only a bad movie, a self-aggrandizing, shallow, intensely dull movie.

There is a romance. Two guys and a girl. Ben Affleck, gleaming with the callow hubris of a studio executive or highly successful action film director; Josh Hartnett, boyishness itself; Kate Beckinsale, willing to work for scale. Best buds since childhood; cute nurse. They're pilots. She likes red lipstick. This will take up almost an hour-and-a-half of your life. Then bombs fall for a while, the romance has a few setbacks, then we go bomb some buildings near Tokyo. Takes about three hours all told, and to paraphrase Ben Franklin, clichés, like fish and critics, begin to stink after three hours.

I admire Bay's brio in the nonsense that is "The Rock" and his blustery hot air in interviews and DVD commentaries, but I do long for this movie to go down in plumes of acrid smoke. What purpose does this farrago serve? I can't but dispute a rollercoaster ride about carnage that's too PC to use historically authentic racial slurs for Germans, Japanese or blacks, yet eliminates the residents of Hawaii—Hawaiians—to all but a handful of non-speaking background faces.

While similar to the F. Scott Fitzgerald-written World War I romance, "Three Comrades," Michael Bay is no Frank Borzage. The script, credited to "Braveheart"'s Randall Wallace, makes "Titanic"'s capable banalities seem like soaring poetry. The plot mechanics creak and clatter, and groans will be rising from every sentient being seated near you.

The romance is brightly colored, yet hardly competent. The movie plays as if Bay had taken poet William Carlos Williams' observation, "No ideas but in things" to the most literate extreme—that displaying things and blowing them up without a shred of wit or subtext while waving a flag—is somehow lyrical art. There are images in a Michael Bay film, but no imagery. While the eager, emphatic, hyperkinetic "Moulin Rouge" left me worried for my blood pressure, Bay's antically skewed sightlines and Louma-like crane shots are plain annoying, filled with the kind of bounce you get from a pup who's just seen a rabbit.

With his magpie-greedy eye for gloss, Bay is like Norman Rockwell shooting the Three Stooges. Didn't he laugh at least the first time he heard the actors rehearsing these awful lines of dialogue? The eye ping-pongs from Kate Beckinsale's anachronistic makeup to the peculiar lighting on Affleck's homely face that never fails to illuminate the strands and bubbles of spit clinging to his lips and oddly capped teeth when he tries to speak in his insulting approximation of a Tennessee accent. One thing Bay couldn't mess up was Josh Hartnett's remarkable skin. Hartnett is not only is the only performer who seems to be awake, he fairly gleams. As a time capsule of this 22-year-old actor's gorgeous looks and the good graces brought to it by the end-credited likes of Kiehl's, Aveda and MOP hair products, "Pearl Harbor" is a dazzler. Most of the rest of the time, I had leisure to wonder if this is the sort of stale popcorn that ordinarily gets three stars from the Trib, or to listen in on the rustle of the snack wrappers of major metropolitan critics and contemplate the foul stench of the McClurg Court's carpet, as well as to realize that the score's main soar, shockingly enough, sounds like a re-purposing of the main melody in the score to "Flashdance," an early Jerry Bruckheimer co-production.

The battle scene, rife with CGI illusions, goes on and on, always vivid but seldom vibrant. What is the point of the movie? What could it possibly represent to a contemporary audience? One of the few things I could discern is the script's hearty bearhug of that ever-popular talk show and television news trope—heroism is attained through victimhood. I was roused at one moment where model-club kid-turned-actress James King, playing a jailbait runaway nurse, is running toward camera within a crowd being strafed, coltish and clumsy. Suddenly, there was a glimpse of true, physical behavior in a rotten setting: A second's freshness that passed quickly.

If this is the best that American studios can produce, it's all over but the dubious bookkeeping. There is an antidote: not in visiting "Disney's Pearl Harbor Experience!", but in renting the video of Elem Klimov's 1984 World War II masterpiece , "Come and See," which has the integrity to suggest that the will to war is perhaps more mad than our mass culture's financiers are willing to concede. Truth, in "Pearl Harbor," to use Timothy McVeigh's notorious phrase, is only "collateral damage." It's only a desecration, Michael. It's only a lie.

"Pearl Harbor" zeroes in Friday.