The Pacific

(2010)
Since Band of Brothers was an unqualified success (and an amazing miniseries), the same creative team (Hanks, Spielberg et al.) offered up this miniseries last year, chronicling the efforts of American soldiers in the other theater of war, the Pacific. The show mainly follows the stories of three marines John Basilone (John Sena), a Medal of Honor winner; Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), a front-line grunt; and Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazello), a mortar operator. Their stories rarely intertwine Leckie and Sledge share a single scene together but all add up to form an impressive picture of what this part of the war was like. The series starts off slow we have the inevitable aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and then Guadalcanal, which is followed by a whole episode of leave for Leckie and being shipped home to sell war bonds for Basilone. While textured and gritty, the show doesnt really find its feet until Sledge finally joins the marines, at age eighteen, and falls in with a seasoned outfit of combat veterans, most notably jaded fellow mortar man Snafu (Rami Melek). We bounce back and forth between the three men, watching as comrade after comrade dies and the horrors of this war any war become apparent. While each of the main three leads plays a captivating role, its really Sledges story that emerges toward the end as the most gripping. We see him go through hell on earth literally and watch the slow deterioration of the soul of a nave and trusting young man slip away as he becomes a violent shell of a man (joining Snafu, who initially plays as a foil and ends up a virtual twin). The production values are extraordinary, and even when you know youre seeing computer graphics such as the American or Japanese fleets steaming by offshore still, everything looks completely real, and is recreated impeccably. Direction is also uniformly excellent (I was pleased to see David Nutters name at the start of an episode or two), and the acting is uniformly terrific. It would be hard to single out anyone from the smallest role all the way up to the three leads, everyone turns in a standout performance, just simply superb. The Pacific is excellent I would almost say required viewing, but the subject matter is horribly dark, more along the lines of what we would normally associate with a movie about Viet Nam rather than WWII. Theres the same sense of communal suffering that runs through Band of Brothers, but theres no sense of triumph here when the war ends, merely relief mixed with disbelief (and the episode that chronicles the homecoming of the survivors is perhaps the most emotionally powerful of them all). For all that America likes to remember WWII as The Good War, well, for those who fought on the insect-infested islands against an implacable foe, it was anything but. A minor note; there are some who may complain that the Japanese are underrepresented as faceless monsters or what have you (though I would disagree, pointing to episode nine, set on Okinawa), but this isnt Letters From Iwo Jima. Two of the three lead characters published books in real life (all characters in the show

are real people, and the stories told actually happened), and I believe the intent was to capture the war as these men experienced it rather than to give an unbiased historical overview. In that aim, the series succeeds marvelously. Though I have never been and have never wanted to be in a war, with this series, you feel like youre right there with these men an impressive accomplishment. Its every bit as good as Band of Brothers, and thats saying something. January 11, 2011