Um, the Iowa hadn't been built when Pearl Harbor was bombed. It was the Oklahoma that capsized.
http://www.hazegray.org/danfs/battlesh/bb37.htm
I just got back from Pearl Harbor, and I was certainly disappointed. It was a sappy love story that tried far too hard to follow in Saving Private Ryan's footsteps, and it failed miserably. The action sequences weren't
too bad, unless you happen to have a serious interest in the Pacific Theatre and naval warfare in general, and know what the various ships looked like. Some of the errors were so blatant you could spot them almost instantly, despite the ships being obscured by clouds, explosions, smoke, etc. I had heard that there were CGI errors in the commercials, and that these were supposed to be fixed before the movie went to the theaters. Apparently they didn't bother. (Uh-oh! I didn't get good CGI and I heard they were gonna fix it! The movie is incomplete and I want my money back!
)
What I've noticed so far:
1) Other than the battleships, almost every ship that gets blown up onscreen is not of a WW2-era design. The ships have very boxish superstructures, and little or no equipment forward of the bridge (such as gun turrets, cranes, etc.). Nothing large and immediately noticeable, anyway.
I've gone through photos of every ship damaged at Pearl
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-1.htm (the 2nd to Last paragraph has a list), with the exception of the tug
USS Sotoyomo (YT-9) and
Floating Drydock Number 2, the only one that even comes close to matching what's onscreen is the seaplane tender
USS Curtiss (AV-4), and even that's a stretch.
After going through
Navsource's image archives, the destroyed vessels bear the most resemblence to
Spruance-class destroyers and
Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, which we all know were around in 1941.
2) Like the US ships in the Pearl Harbor attack, what seems like ALL of the Japanese carriers were in fact American supercarriers! Almost all WW2 carriers have long and fairly narrow rectangular flight decks with few irregularities. These ships, on the other hand, have very wide flight decks that taper at the front and back, much like a Nimitz does. I think the only carrier that they got right is
USS Hornet.
3)Not too certain about this one, but many of the ships travelling in the Japanese fleets looked like Aegis destroyers or cruisers. Glimpses of the fleet were short and infrequent, so it's hard to say.
Really, I'd have to go see the movie again to double-check everything I've said, but there is no way I'm wasting another $4.50 and 3 hours of my life just to confirm my points about the effects screw-ups. I'd rather go downstairs and watch my recording of Tora! Tora! Tora!; it's a far better movie, and is actually interesting enough that I've never bothered to look for effects errors (good movies do that, keep you interested in the characters and events and not the things that go BOOM!).
[This message has been edited by Noble713 (edited 27 May 2001).]