Pearl Harbor beats out Windtalkers because they had the effrontery to premiere it on an aircraft carrier deck in Pearl Harbor with surviving veterans invited as guests of honor!!! One can only wonder what those old vets thought of that piece of **** intelligence insulting travesty of a movie. It is honestly in the top 3 worst movies I have ever seen, and I've seen all of Ed Wood's movies!
Another worthy candidate is Green Berets the movie that treats the Vietnam war like a big game of cowboys and indians. Flyboys also comes to mind, but that said both of these movies are leagues above Pearl Harbor.
The Thin Red Line is a great movie if you can understand it, yes it can be taken as a little artsy fartsy, but if you've read the book you'll understand what they were trying for with the movie, as the book has a lot of introspection from the soldiers involved and the movie tried to deal with this. The movie is not just about war it's an exploration of the men fighting the war, their motives, their character and their reaction to the nightmare unfolding around them. That's where it's biggest fault lies though, I think they tried to go for too wide a scope with the characterization, they should have concentrated on fewer characters from the book. All criticism aside though this film as no place among the pieces of **** you guys are talking about in this thread.
Saving Private Ryan is an interesting one, I saw it at the cinema when I was 15 and it blew me away completely, it was like nothing I had ever seen before and personally for me it fostered a high degree of interest in WW2 and consequently much reading! The D-Day scene still stands as one of the best combat sequences ever put to film. In retrospect though as an adult watching it again through more wizened eyes I feel that this opening sequence is basically the only worthwhile portion of the entire film. The remainder of the movie is a host of stereotypes and cliches wrapped up in a neat and dramatic little Hollywood story. Even the final combat scene cannot save the movie as it plays out completely unrealistically, right down to the good guys arriving right at the last gasp to save the day. I certainly wouldn't list it as one of the worst war movies ever made, nor would I list it as one of the greatest, somewhere in the middle of the road I reckon.