Paul McKinney steadied himself against the theater wall. He was 20 years old on Dec. 7, 1941, when he left his mess hall in Pearl Harbor and first saw the planes. “They had red dots on the sides,” he said. “We didn't know what they were at first. Of course, turns out they were Japanese.”

Yesterday morning, Mr. McKinney and eight other members of the Toledo chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, remembered all over again. They attended the first screening at Showcase Maumee of the $135 million war epic Pearl Harbor.

Mr. McKinney was last into the theater. The others, in black and white garrison caps and baby-blue sports coats, shuffled in, shoulders squared. The audience, spotting Survivors Association patches on their jackets, clapped as the men, avoiding the stairs, filed into the last half-circled row on the floor. The men waved.

Then, at 12:35 p.m., after 90 minutes of romance - “too sappy,” they agreed afterwards - and nearly 60 years later, the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor again.

This was it. The men sat rock solid, heads tilted up, as wave after wave of Japanese planes bombed and strafed ships at anchor in the harbor and planes on the ground at the airfield.

Finally, Ray Strausbaugh, 80, couldn't take it any more.

He got up and walked out. A reporter asked whether he was all right: “Oh, I'm fine. I've got to use the restroom.” He was followed by two more Pearl Harbor survivors - it is a three-hour movie after all.

With slow steps, Mr. McKinney walked out just as the USS Arizona took a hit. He made it back just in time for the end of the Japanese offensive.

By 2:06 p.m., the attack was over. Ben Affleck flew into the sunset. The movie's sun-kissed sentiment faded to black as the first credit floated up. Len Kowalski, 82, president of the Toledo chapter, hitched himself up in his seat, steadied his cap, put a hand to his cheek, and with wide eyes said:

“Well, I survived that.”

He turned to Clarence Holub, and asked, “Whad' ya think partner?”

“I can't hear anything!”

Pearl Harbor was very loud, they agreed. For some, the movie was louder than the real thing. During the actual attack, a couple of the veterans slept while the first planes buzzed the harbor. Others only heard it from inside the steel hulls of battleships.

“Yeah, they probably turned it up a bit louder than when you were there,” Mr. Holub said. “It just depends on where you were.”

That morning in 1941, George Green, then 19, slept in the magazine handling room of the USS Utah - not a good place to be. “Me and this other guy had been ashore at bars until 2 in the morning,” he said. They were surrounded by a roomful of gunpowder when a blast jolted them awake - a torpedo and a bomb slammed into the ship simultaneously. “We had no business being down there,” he said.

By the time Mr. Green clawed his way to the top deck, the ship rolled. He slid into the water and hid beneath a corner of the boat as Japanese fighters strafed his company. When the skies cleared, he swam through oil to get to shore. As he described this, he gripped a ticket stub between the only two fingers on his right hand, presumably a grim reminder of America's first hours in World War II.

“Oh, no,” he said. “This is from after the war. I got in a fight with a bulldozer.”

And the movie? Only so-so, Mr. Green, now 80, said.

“Should'a been scary.”

That was the consensus. Out of nine Pearl Harbor survivors, seven thought the movie was lame, and the two others thought it was “fine, oh, just fine.” The biggest complaint: “Too spectacular.” And too many explosions, and too many bodies tossed into the air - the historical event on steroids, if you will.

“It was a disappointment,” said Tom Child, 81, of Findlay. He was a 21-year-old torpedo officer at Pearl Harbor. “Overkill, overkill, overkill. The Japanese planes did what they were supposed to do and got out of there. They didn't fly around all afternoon like that.”

As the veterans walked into the lobby, no one approached to ask what it was like to be at Pearl Harbor. So they stuck together, mumbling to each other that the movie was no Tora, Tora, Tora. But mostly, they just shrugged and left.

“Here's how I see it,” Mr. Holub said. “This was just a matter of watching things that already happened to these men here, except what you're watching now is this big movie, and no matter what, it's always just a movie. It's not at all real. I don't know if I'm explaining myself so well - I don't know how to put it nice. But I guess I can say this: The bombs didn't hit so hard this time.”

First Published May 26, 2001, 12:00 p.m.