A date which will live in infamy...

This legendary box-office dud from superstar director Steven
Spielberg is like an "Airplane!" or "Naked Gun" parody made with
all the spectacle and epic scope that Universal Pictures could
buy. But Spielberg doesn't know how to be as funny as the
"Airplane!" crew, and doing dumb gags on a monster scale doesn't
make them any less dumb; in fact, they can be less effective for
trying too hard. It starts with a "Jaws"-opener spoof (using the
same naked, swimming actress) as a Japanese submarine prowls the
California coast during the opening months of WWII. SoCal is in a
paranoid mood, and there's a lot of chain-reaction gags about
stereotyped Americans bumbling around trying to find and repel
the invaders but only blasting themselves. Meanwhile the
dignified Imperial sub commander (Toshiro Mifune) gets rather
fed up with the attitude of his Nazi guest officer (Christopher
Lee). Maybe it's trying to be subversive, iconclastic, National
Lampoonish, whatever, but all you get is a sense of a filmmaker
with high-school sensibilities playing with his mighty prop toys
and vintage sets, leaving the characterizations so elemental to
Spielberg films seeming shallow and one-note. No director should
be penalized for just doing a silly entertainment for a lark, not
even the guy who made "Empire of the Sun" and "Saving Private
Ryan." But this pageant of overproduction more annoyed than
overwhelmed me.