I love Band of Brothers. It was the first television series I became obsessed with--before I saw it, I didn't even have a favorite television series. So imagine my delight when I hear about The Pacific, a spiritual successor based on the true stories of Marines fighting in the Pacific Theatre in WWII. I was ecstatic: more characters based on real persons to care about, more attention to historical detail, more battles.
I almost didn't finish this series.
Let it be known now that I was not expecting something exactly like BoB. I didn't want or care to see the same types of characters, situations, etc. However, The Pacific was unlike BoB in ways that made the show suffer, so if BoB did something well that TP did not do well, I will compare the two. The Pacific does have its moments, but they are very, very few.
Quick summarization: The Pacific is about the true experiences of three Marines, Robert Leckie (author of Helmet for My Pillow), John Basilone (winner of the Medal of Honor), and Eugene Sledge (author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa). It follows them through battles and downtime at home, Guadalcanal, Melbourne, Gloucester, Pavuvu, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and back home again.
The major problems with this series are its short length, lack of focus, characters, and one-sidedness of the narrative. Length itself is not an indicator of how good something is. Some three-hour movies need to be longer while some two-hour movies go on for too long. The Pacific is much shorter than BoB, despite having the same number of episodes. BoB ends up at about ten hours; TP is about eight-and-a-half. BoB episodes average to an hour; TP episodes to fifty minutes. To truncate further, the history lesson and credits take up about eight minutes, leaving us with approximately forty minutes of story for the longest episodes. This lack of time is detrimental to the story and its character. In "Part 4," Leckie's group is on Gloucester; it's rainy, muddy, and an all-around miserable place to be in. About twenty minutes into the episode, the screen fades to black and comes back with a visual of the Marines leaving and a title saying that six months have passed and now the Marines are going to Pavuvu to rest. The problem was that it did not feel like they spent six months on that island. It would have been like if the Battle of the Bulge segment of BoB stopped after the scene in "Bastogne" where Doc Roe prays in his foxhole. We would not have felt the cold and misery of Easy Company had we not seen two solid hours of them suffering from hunger, frostbite, trenchfoot, supply deficiencies, and being bombarded with artillery in the snowy woods. In the same way, we do not feel how miserable the jungle in Gloucester was because we aren't given enough time to appreciate what they went through. We get a snippet, but it's not enough to make an impression. This series needed more time to breathe and let us experience what is happening.
A good example of when this does occur is in "Part V" (what happened to proper episode titles?) during the Peleliu landing. The trip to shore is presented more or less in real time, letting us bob along in the landing craft with the men in their too-much-to-bear anxiety. They pray, throw up, and smile encouragingly at each other, even as they're terrified (or excited) about what's going to happen when they hit the beaches. The Pacific succeeds here by not cutting short an effective moment, but by showing all its elements. Then the Marines land on the beach and we get a two-minute long take of Sledge crawling on the beach towards the trees. Shells explode only a few feet away from him; soldiers fall all around him, yet he is never hit. He is terrified in his first taste of war and we feel his terror, staying with him every second of this tracking shot. It is a wonderfully effective moment that puts us in his place and lets us experience a small piece of what real war is like. Of course, no film or TV show can perfectly represent what a real war zone is like, but this segment made me feel like I was there just a little bit.
Here's something that's more subjective, but also something I know other viewers think. Right around episode 7 I realised that I didn't have a favorite character. This was so strange because I liked so many of them in Sledge's book--Sledge, Ack Ack, Doc Caswell--that I was surprised to find that I didn't care about them in the show. I was really surprised to find that my favorite person from the book, Caswell, was not even in the series, considering the importance of the medical personnel. Now, it's possible to grow fond of people after a very short time. After one episode of To Serve Them All My Days, I was more attached to David Powlett-Jones than I was to any of the characters of TP after seven episodes, so less screen time with the characters is not the issue. Instead, it's the writing that does not allow us to see enough sides of the characters, and the acting, which doesn't give us portrayals that we can sympathise with. I didn't feel like I knew them--I felt like I was observing only a part of their experience instead of living and connecting with them. After the seventh episode, I stopped remembering the show was on and were it not for my father, I would have missed the last episode entirely. Without attachments to the characters, I didn't care what happened in the story.
What makes matters worse is the disjointedness of the story. We follow three Marines in different companies. Two of them meet for one scene halfway through the show, but besides that, none of them have interactions with each other. Sometimes one of the characters does not appear in an episode, or is given a couple of minutes, leading some viewers to forget about who these people are when they next appear. I had to keep reminding my father, who watched the show with me, who everyone was whenever they appeared on screen. This lack of focus means that the audience cannot get to know the characters as well and may even forget about them for episodes at a time, which is always a dangerous thing when you're trying to build audience sympathy. Once again, the writing is at fault. A longer runtime might have solved this issue. The constant back-and-forth action was especially confusing in "Part II" when the action cycled between Leckie and Basilone, whose companies are both on Guadalcanal. I would enter a scene thinking I was still with Basilone's group, then see Leckie writing back home. That the scenes take place at night made matters even worse. Maybe some subtitles during location changes would have cleared that up. Luckily, none of the following episodes have this problem--we always know where we are during the rest of the series.
What do I think would have solved this problem of disjointedness? Cutting out Basilone's story. Spielberg, Hanks and company could have done a separate movie solely about him. That would have left us with Leckie in the first half of the series, with occasional cuts to Sledge at home and training, and Sledge in the second half, with glimpses of Leckie's recovery, with Basilone's story all by itself. Leckie, Sledge, and their companies would be covered more fully and would not be left on the sidelines for episodes at a time. Basilone did have a good story--Guadalcanal, the Medal of Honor ceremony, the trip home (where he was exploited for his war deeds), his romance with Lena, and Iwo Jima. But the inclusion of his character took away time from all the stories and made the whole production suffer for it.
This may seem like an odd criticism, but hear me out: this show was pure depression. And it should not have been.
Let me clarify. Band of Brothers has many humorous and light-hearted scenes in it that help balance out the horrendous war action. Not only that, but most of the funny bits happened in real life: Babe falling into a German's foxhole, Malarkey and More cruising around the countryside on a motorcycle, and Winters pouring Nixon's urine on his face to wake him up. I eagerly awaited many humorous scenes from Sledge's book. The scene I most wanted to see was an incident on Okinawa where Sledge stumbles across an abandoned stretcher; having not had a dry night's sleep in weeks, he lies down on it, pulls his poncho over himself, and has a good rest. He wakes up when he feels himself being lifted in the air by two Marines who assumed he was a corpse. He's a bit spooked, though his friends laugh. It would have been a great scene to balance out the depression of the rest of the episode. It never appeared, and neither did the other lighter moments I liked so much from the book. BoB has great balance between the funny and the horrific, the heartfelt and the anger, the action and the downtime, and this balance makes the whole experience feel more authentic. It shows everything to give a panorama of how war is, rather than a truncated, one-sided view. The Pacific lacks this balance, creating an environment marked by nothing but sadness and war horror, when, as Sledge's book (and other books) shows, more happened in war than just the horrific. TP does have some humor--I laughed hysterically at the scene in "Part III" where the Marines are standing at attention and one of them falls flat on his face, arousing laughter, sympathy, and pain (Haha--poor guy--OUCH!). The line about the Japanese poisoning coconuts also struck the right chord because it felt like the kind of joke that a person in that situation would make. But these moments were too few and far between, making the presentation too lopsided and inauthentic. Even the downtime on Pavuvu was depressing. I want to see these characters have some good times and triumphs; I don't want to see them do nothing but suffer. I think this is a reason why I wasn't attached to anyone in this show. Band of Brothers says, "This is war--love and hate, laughter and anger, beauty and horror." The Pacific says, "War is terrible, awful, horrible, and that's that."
Now for some praise. If The Pacific has one thing that I wished Band of Brothers had, it is a "returning home" episode. It was great to see the effects of war already showing themselves with Sledge's nightmares and his desire to stay away from the public. Though I had no attachment to the Sledge of the series, I felt pained when I heard him shrieking out in his sleep from the nightmares because I knew what he had been through. I liked the inclusion of the brutally honest part where Sledge tries to apply somewhere and tells the woman that the one thing he can do really well is kill. And wasn't it so heartless of Leckie's parents to use his room for storage while he was away? Having said that, I wish we could have gotten a more conclusive ending. Sledge walking in a field didn't quite do it in terms of wrapping up everything. The scene itself was fine, displaying the calmness that came after one person's war experience in which most of his company died but he was left physically untouched and was allowed to return home to a serene environment, but it didn't work as an ending to an epic series. I'm not saying that he should have had some wonderful revelation or anything, but the show needed something more to have closure.
On a final note...the opening titles deserve credit. The charcoal drawings were an inspired touch, especially how the breaking of the charcoal ended up resembling shrapnel and the dirt that flies through the air from bombs. I imagine that one of the characters ends up as an artist, and he is drawing the pictures in the credits from his memories; the charcoal breaks because his memories are so powerful that he presses too hard and snaps the stick. The colors are various sepia tones infused with just a little red to remind us of blood. The music is very appropriate for the theme of war--somber and reminiscent with some joy and I-don't-know-what-else-I-just-know-it-when-I-hear-it. My father said it reminded him of church music. Looking back, the opening was my favorite thing about the series. On a glum note, the opening was my favorite thing about the series.
One question for those well-versed in war history: at the end of "Part VI," we see Leckie on a hospital ship that has a large Red Cross symbol draped across the top of it. I know that medics covered or removed their armbands in the Pacific because the Japanese soldiers would target those wearing red crosses. So, is that tarp an inaccuracy? Would any hospital ship have carried a huge, "Hey, dive bomb me" symbol? Or is this detail accurate?
That is my take on The Pacific. I would recommend this series only to those who watch lots of war movies. If you agree or disagree, please post a comment and tell me your opinion. Respectfully, of course--no name-calling or profanity, please. I've seen too many good discussions derailed because of disrespectful comments.
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