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Ben Affleck’s 183-Minute World War II Epic Hits Free Streaming on May 1

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With one high-octane flick after another, Michael Bay has made a name for himself as one of the most explosive directors in action. Whether you love him or hate him, the helmer continuously brings pulse-pounding stories to the big screen and has backed some of the most popular genre franchises in recent memory, like Transformers and Bad Boys. While he might be best known for his fictitious sci-fi leanings, Bay has also dipped his hands into the world of history, molding two flicks off true events — although he naturally threw in a heavy side of drama on both.

Most recently was 2016’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which saw a cast led by John Krasinski depict the events that followed the harrowing attack made on the titular city in Libya. With a 51% critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is one of the higher-scoring titles to come from the director and, out of his two historical films, it blows the other to smithereens. We are, of course, talking about Bay’s 2001 action drama Pearl Harbor, which, despite its magnificent win at the global box office, has gone down as one of the worst historical films out there.

In a world inundated with WWII movies overflowing with on-point favorites like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a movie about what was at the time the deadliest attack on American soil should have been a shoo-in to the vault of classics as well as awards season. Unfortunately, Bay’s work was a massive misfire that had critics, audiences, and historians talking about all the wrong things. Starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale, the wartime drama doesn’t primarily focus on the titular WWII attack as its name would suggest, but instead largely follows an over-the-top love triangle between its three main characters. And yet, if you’re searching for some exciting WWII-centered entertainment that stokes the flames of romantic drama, look no further than Tubi when, on May 1, Pearl Harbor arrives on the free streamer.

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Which Oscar Best Picture
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Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

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🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

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What kind of film experience do you actually want?
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Which idea grabs you most in a film?
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The Academy Has Decided
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Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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‘Pearl Harbor’s Financial Win

Despite only scrounging up a 24% critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and being massively panned by WWII experts, Pearl Harbor brought hoards of audiences to cinemas. While the colliding and overlapping love stories at the center of the tale may have pushed some away in the end, the distressing events of the titular attack were told by Bay in a way that lived up to the director’s legacy. When all was said and done, the star-studded flick earned a staggering $449.2 million at the global box office against its $140 million production budget.

Head over to Tubi on May 1 to stream Pearl Harbor.


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Release Date

May 25, 2001

Runtime

183 minutes

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Writers

Randall Wallace

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Producers

Jennifer Klein, Jerry Bruckheimer, K.C. Hodenfield, Kenny Bates, Pat Sandston

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