In the 1970s George Lucas (Star Wars) and Steven Spielberg (Jaws) put event films onto our national cultural agenda and permanently changed the way Hollywood does business.

At their best (Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List, one of the Vatican's top 45 movies), event films help define important changes in our consciousness. At their worst (Armageddon, Godzilla, etc.), they're merely pop-culture consumer products that are meant to be quickly experienced, merchandised and discarded.

Pearl Harbor tries desperately to take the high road. Director Michael Bay (Armageddon), producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun) and screen-writer Randall Wallace (Braveheart) are aware of the significance of their movie's real-life inspiration. The Japanese surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, did more than catch our Pacific Fleet off guard. It was a national humiliation that robbed us of our dignity and forever altered our military and diplomatic relationships with the rest of the world.

The filmmakers fail to dramatize these issues in anything but the most superficial manner, shying away from the controversial aspects of both American and Japanese behavior prior to the bombing. The movie has other equally noble ambitions, aspiring to evoke an era of lost innocence and to honor the men and women of that generation who sacrificed themselves for their country.

But their characters have no interior life, displaying few emotions other than patriotism and romantic distress. The action sequences are striking (as expected in a $140 million production), but the personal stories are on a par with a below-average TV movie and have no larger resonance.

Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) were best friends as boys in rural Tennessee who always wanted to fly. They volunteer for the Army Air Corps just before the outbreak of World War II. During training Rafe falls in love with Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), a highly professional, kind-hearted nurse whose father was also a flyboy.

The buddies separate when the gung-ho Rafe joins the English Eagle Squadron to save Great Britain from the Nazis. Evelyn and Danny are both re-assigned to picturesque Hawaii, where they receive news that Rafe has been killed in action.

Sparks fly between the two as they mourn their mutual friend, and soon they're lovers. Rafe inconveniently turns up alive and is understandably bitter at what he takes to be their betrayal. The filmmakers try to generate some tears over this romantic triangle but seem uninterested in probing too deeply into its moral implications.

In the meantime, the Japanese, led by Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) secretly mobilize for the surprise attack while publicly pursuing peace negotiations. A U.S. Navy cryptologist in Washington, Thurman (Dan Aykroyd), intuits that they plan to hit Pearl Harbor, and the movie generates some mild suspense as we root for him to persuade his skeptical superiors to get ready.

Of course, Thurman fails. The filmmakers use state-of-the-art digital technology to manufacture a gripping set of images which effectively illustrate the panic and carnage that follow.

To tie up the narrative loose ends, the movie continues beyond the Japanese bombing to include a retaliatory American raid on Tokyo. President Franklin Roosevelt (Jon Voight) pushes the military to come up with some kind of payback, and Rafe and Danny are recruited by their flight-school commander, Col. James Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), to sign up for this semi-suicidal mission.

With the best of intentions, Pearl Harbor misunderstands the nature of the warrior ethic in America and Japan during World War II. It projects the filmmakers' very contemporary notions of masculine virtue back into an era where other values had priority.

Rafe and Danny epitomize a certain kind of 21st-century young male who's supposed to be in touch with his feelings and quick to verbalize them. This politically correct psychology creates a soft-hearted personality type that makes the courage and eagerness for combat of the movie's protagonists ring false. Nor are their conceptions of virtue consistent with what we would expect from the best and brightest of that generation: The protagonists' moral code allows for a ready embrace of premarital relations. Only Doolittle, who has no personal life in the film, is completely believable.

Similarly, the Japanese military's fierce intelligence and samurai-like dedication to victory are watered down; clearly, the decision was made to avoid any characterization that might offend today's Japanese-Americans. But the filmmakers' sanitized way of achieving this laudable goal weakens our appreciation of how the differences between the two countries' cultures may have contributed to the outcome.

The Disney Co., which financed the film, hosted a $5 million party on the USS Stennis at Pearl Harbor for celebrities, the press and other public figures. The heavily promoted festivities generated as much media attention as important real-life news items such as Sen. Jeffords' defection from the Republican Party. This turned the movie into the biggest event film ever. But with that success comes a responsibility to increase our understanding of what happened, and why, on that “day that will live in infamy.” The filmmakers aren't up to the challenge.

Arts & culture correspondent John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.