The Pacific

[Monte Carlo]

The Pacific is showing on satellite TV her in the UK (Sky exclusive) and is being hyped as the TV event of the 21st Century. Messrs Hanks and Spielberg's continuing mission to chronicle the experience of the American fighting man in WW2 continues apace, and laudable it is too. Last night I saw the first two parts back-to-back.

 

But.

 

Band of Brothers was better. Much, much better. I'll get to that bit later.

 

What of The Pacific? It did a good job of explaining the war in this theatre as the Blitzkreig nobody writes about, a savage conflagration on a par with the Eastern Front as far as brutality is concerned and about how Guadalcanal was one airfield away from cutting off Australia. But after that it lost it's way.

 

The source material probably doesn't help in this respect - the tight narrative of BoB (i.e. one cohesive unit based on Ambrose's accomplished if slightly hagiographic book) is lost as we meet three different protagonists in different units. It also doesn't help that they all wear identical uniforms, in the dark, in very confusing steadicam-shot firefights. This callsign spent numerous WTF moments trying to work out who was who, why, and in what direction. The enormity of the war seemed to subsume the human stories in a way BoB managed effortlessly. I do wonder why?

 

One clever scene was the marine assault on Guadalcanal where Spielberg references Saving Private Ryan. I'm not wildly familiar with the minutiae of this battle so was expecting the Japanese MGs to rake the landing craft in some sort of tropical version of Omaha Beach. The marines puke into their landing craft, men look stoically into middle distance, naval guns boom overhead and.... Nothing happens - our happy leathernecks just wander onto the beach looking bemused. It's a neat moment.

 

But apart from that it lacks the polish, humanity and narrative that makes Band of Brothers such a major achievement. The Pacific has a bigger budget and what is clearly a carefully chosen and accomplished cast of character actors... but it missing that certain something. It's early days, but already I'm struggling to identify with the marines of The Pacific as much as I did Easy Company.

 

I'll stick with it, maybe it will take some time to get going, the views of other forumites are welcome.

 

Cheers

MC

[Gfted1]

Im DRV-ing the whole series and have also caught the first two episodes. I thought they were pretty good but I never bothered with Band of Brothers so I have nothing to compare it too. The beach landing was hilarious: "What took you guys so long?"

[Kor Qel Droma]

I like the Pacific.

 

I can agree with the OP about having a hard time keeping track of some of the characters, but that gets slightly better with the next few episodes.

 

Comparisons to BoB are inevitable, but I'm willing to wait until the season plays out before I make any kind of judgement.

[Hurlshort]

Cheers for teaching me a new word today Monte. Hagiology is interesting.

[Monte Carlo]

[Monte Carlo]

Im DRV-ing the whole series and have also caught the first two episodes. I thought they were pretty good but I never bothered with Band of Brothers so I have nothing to compare it too.

 

Band of Brothers is awesome, for me personally it's one of the best pieces of TV drama ever made.

[Wrath of Dagon]

Nothing can beat Baa Baa Black Sheep.

[Kaftan Barlast]

They have a bigger budget than BoB? Ive only seen two episodes but it feels much cheaper to me, I hope it gets better later on. And that John Seda dies soon, he's such a douche

 

[Monte Carlo]

They filmed The Pacific in Australia with a massive budget (150 million US dollars, that's a lot of steel helmets and rubber rifles), BoB was filmed by and large in a parking lot in Hertfordshire here in the UK in 2000 / 2001. They used lots of CGI in BoB (some of it now looks slightly dated, for example the air armada scenes in Day of Days).

[Monte Carlo]

Just Wiki'd BoB - that was 110 million in 2000... just as big a budget just a less glamorous location.

[Gorgon]

Yeah, Spielberg and Hanks said they had already done the following the group of soldiers from start to finish thing so now they were going to focus the show on how the war affected the soldiers as human beings. Consequently it's rather depressing and somewhat boring.

[Monte Carlo]

^ Strange, seeing as BoB does that too. Many of Easy Company are changed by the war, for better or worse.

 

It's early days for The Pacific, I grant you, but Guadalcanal hasn't really drawn me into the drama (it's had 1.5 hours so it should have done - The Wire it ain't) and the characters are unremarkable.

[cronicler]

MC; to be frank, I don't think it is possible to make a BoB that explains what happened in the Pacific theater because aside from the aircraft carrier groups, the whole war was a series of small to medium actions (compared to other ww2 actions) that were unrelated to each other in the tactical scale. There isn't a single thread to follow so the story gets tangled or unrevealed too much.

 

If you are intrested, the best "single story" about Pacific that I read is John Toland's "Infamy: Pearl Harbor And Its Aftermath" It follows the pacific war (mostly) from the viewpoint of Big E (Enterprise).

 

*The looking at Pacific theater as a single entity is misleading, there is the sea/island war, the invasion of Australia, the invasion of Philiphines and lastly the invasion of China.

[Monte Carlo]

^ I take your point, maybe I didn't make myself clear.

 

Take Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead.

 

It's a classic example of literary war fiction. It's set in the South Pacific and it's about a small unit.

[GreasyDogMeat]

Im DRV-ing the whole series and have also caught the first two episodes. I thought they were pretty good but I never bothered with Band of Brothers so I have nothing to compare it too. The beach landing was hilarious: "What took you guys so long?"

You should really rent the set if you get a chance. One of the best series I've seen with interviews from the real people the show was based on.

[Hiro Protagonist]

Some observations:

 

Very little character development. People are getting shot and I'm thinking "should I care about this person, who was that".

You cant see what the hell is going on in the fire fights most of the time.

 

What I don't like is they've almost used the non-epic nature of Pacific battles to make each company somewhat smaller. Most of episode 2 focused on the one machine gun nest, hence that's all you really see. Unfortunately, there's no sharp-shooting and not many US casualties as a result. If you really have to compare it to BoB, then that's why BoB was so effective in that it focused on different characters, and even the ones that lasted just one episode were memorable (e.g. Blithe).

 

Also, am I the only one that thinks it all seems a bit "clean". The grittyness of BoB just doesn't seem to be there. All the dirt and scunge seems like they've just walked out of makeup. Even the trenches are all all clean, they look like they've been dug with a back hoe. The CG backgrounds are really obvious as well. Just doesn't have that realistic look and feel to it that BoB did. It really takes a lot away from what otherwise is quite a decent show. It's like they didn't put on the War Lens on their cameras when fliming this.

 

Also in episode 1&2, The Battle of Henderson field was huge. That scene shown in the episode didn't show the 700 Marines that held that line or the 6000 artillery shells fired at the Japanese. It showed half a platoon and a couple guys fighting hand to hand. I thought the fighting in Guadalcanal was meant to be very rough going for the US, and apart from a shortage of food and ammunition, we haven't seen much of it. Henderson Field was an epic battle all along the line, not a couple of Banzai charges on two machine gun pits. They were overrun in a couple of sectors, there was vicious hand to hand fights to the death everywhere.

 

It mostly seems to have been (so far in both episodes) a bunch of Japanese soldiers charging at fixed Machine Gun emplacements and getting mown down by the dozen. I don't think they captured the desperation of the Americans that well however, as they lost a number of men in that assault, and the battles seem like petty skirmishes and I doubt this was actually the case.

 

The only episode where I could relate and find out who the characters were was Episode 3 in Melbourne. That's been the best episode for me and there was no action or fighting.

 

And again in the latest Episode, the start of the episode showed the old B&W footage of the desperation of soldiers with the mud, torrential rain, neck deep of water, etc and then we cut to the 'clean green jungle', one guy coming across a small patrol of Japanese and it only rained a few minutes halfway in the episode. A little bit more character development with Leckie and his superior which seemed a poor man's copy of Winters and Sobel from BoB. And Leckie at a hospital which seemed out of place with the rest of the episode.

 

I know this isn't BoB II and it may be a little unfair compairing the two, but when you have the same producers doing something similar (10 episode format, veterans at the start, etc) than it's hard not to compare them.

 

Thats where the 'Epicness' of the campaign doesn't come across to the viewer. Its almost like they are taking the cheap route this time to keep costs down. At this rate, by the time we get to Iwo Jima or Saipan its going to consist of 5 or 6 Marines, 2 of who we know, running past 6 dead Japs and shooting down 2 more, 2 planes roaring overhead and 3 CGI ships on the water....roll credits....

Edited April 9, 2010 by Hiro Protagonist

[Hiro Protagonist]

They filmed The Pacific in Australia with a massive budget (150 million US dollars, that's a lot of steel helmets and rubber rifles), BoB was filmed by and large in a parking lot in Hertfordshire here in the UK in 2000 / 2001. They used lots of CGI in BoB (some of it now looks slightly dated, for example the air armada scenes in Day of Days).

 

more than likely due to Australian labour rates.

[Monte Carlo]

Come on, comparisons with BoB are completely valid. It's a part of the same arc that Hanks and Spielberg have openly discussed travelling on.

 

I agree that the European Theatre is more cinematic - familiar, open terrain and toys to film like assault guns and tanks. The Pacific is hand-to-hand combat in dense jungle. Nonetheless, these are issues that a skilled production team should square away before breakfast. I suspect the source material might have something to do with it.

[cronicler]

Not really MC, Most of the EU theater is actually unknown to most people. We are only "fed" the most flashy bits. Not one of the flashy products tell us what goes on in Scandinavia or Balkans or even France at the time of (Bastagone) German counterattack.

 

If they were serious about characterization, S & H could have taken it a bit slower, making each phase a bit longer (2 or 3 episodes per battle) and less flashier to give us the chracters. Also as you mentioned, the whole thing is too clean. No snipers, no real ambushes, no traps, not one bit showing the hell that a jungle can be.

 

 

*Btw, I loved the unrelated pro-Greek propaganda in episode 3. I wonder why they had to mention false and propaganda material concerning Anatolia 1922 in a show that focuses on Pacific 1940.

Edited April 9, 2010 by cronicler

[Gorgon]

I wonder how they are going to tackle Hiroshima. I mean they don't have to, they can just skip over it as it didn't really affect the ground troops other than a massive sigh of relief, but that would also be a copout . It's still controversial of course, there are still living survivors who are very offended by the usual American view that it ended the war (a no brainer) and saved X million lives (that's the controversial part).

[Monte Carlo]

^ I read somewhere that they hope to explain some of the context around why they used atomic weapons.

 

As for controversy over saving 'X' amount of lives, all I can say is what controversy? Backward militaristic monarchy attacks democracy in cynical act of aggression. Democracy losing thousands of it's young men fighting back. Miracle weapon offers opportunity to end it all by killing lots of the other side.

 

Big ethical dilemma, perhaps, but one that was taken in 1945. Looking at it now, an acknowledging the human tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the villain of the piece remains the Imperial Japanese Government, as much as I'd blame Dresden on the Nazis.

[Gorgon]

Well Eisenhower, a general as much as a president, famously said that it was unnecessary. So, yes there is controversy, but maybe you were just stating your opinion.

[Monte Carlo]

I suspect that was Ike the President, as opposed to Ike the General speaking.

[Walsingham]

BoB was based on a specific unit history, wasn't it?

 

I guess I wil watch this show eventually, but you aren't really selling it wholesale.

 

I agree that Europe was more trainspotter-esque with all the bits and bobs of kit. But the Japs had their fair share of weird and wonderful. Plus you could throw in some of the stuff from early war Europe which got shunted across like the M3 Grant. Or bung in little details like the boiler suit coveralls they tried to issue which didn't work because everyone had dysentery most of the time and it was too hard to crap out of them. Hell, some men fought naked from the waist down. Volcanic sands of Iwo Jima... burning out the fortifications on Luzon... There shouldn't really be a shortage of material.

[cronicler]

MC; I feel the need to remind you that US' and Commonwealth's economic strangleholds on Germany and Japan were the main background reasons of the war. (Yes they are classified as 2 seperate wars but the causes and effects are really tightly interlinked.)

 

Japanese might be a feudal / fascist / alien country at the time (they are still somewhat alien to european and middle east cultures) but "Backward militaristic monarchy attacks democracy" is just too broad and not really correct.