HBO's "The Pacific"
Sun, 2010-05-02 12:06
#1
HBO's "The Pacific"
Sun, 2010-05-02 12:10
#2
Excellant series! I love it, as much as I did Band of Brothers. This one shows the descent into barbarity that the war created among its participants
Sun, 2010-05-02 12:16
#3
Is anyone else watching this series?
I read an online review somewhere that criticised the show because it glorified the US war effort. I don't know about that, although the series does suffer from the Hollywood tendency to show "the other," be he Vietnamese, German or Japanese, as part of the scenery behind the US characters' actions.
I don't know enough about the Pacific Theatre to comment on the historical accuracy of the events in the programme, although some scenes do reflect things I've read. For example, in the most recent episode, one of the US soldiers casually flips pebbles into the exposed cranium of a dead Japanese soldier. This really happened. I have to go find the book where I read that; it could be in Robet Leckie's Okinawa. Leckie is a character in the mini-series.
On another note, I've heard a couple of anachronisms that mildly bugged me: "Take a number," and "Oh my God, that's amazing." It's unlikely that a grunt in 1943 would have talked this way.
Sun, 2010-05-02 12:32
#4
'Gee wilkas, sarge! Look at that there wombat! Ain't them things the bee's knees?'
I have long been a supporter of the Make Everything Before the 40s Sound Like The Three Stooges movement. I feel it would give Shakespeare the poignency it needs to relevant to a modern literary environment.
And yeah, The Pacific is amazing. I found that a few of the episodes were gruellingly boring. Call me what you will, but I was never as much a fan of 'A Farewell to Arms', as I was media with titles like 'Top 10 Battles of -inset conflict here-' or 'Enemy at the Gates'.
The pacing of the Australia sequences was too...I don't know. I don't really need to watch dopey romantic subplots or rending alienation and conflicted conscience for what one has done (and now being called a hero) in my HBO specials as whole episodes - a flashback will suffice. Particularly if it is inserted as a longer building up of the character and such. Just get to the explosions and dog fights.
Sun, 2010-05-02 13:56
#5
LOl well the problem PB is that the episodes are written from the memoirs of the main characters in real life. Therefore the boring parts are part of their history and character development. More so than Band of Brothers ever was but I think thats in part due to the nature of the fighting. I think that episode 7 didn't convey enough what the death of Captain Haldane did to the regiment.
Sun, 2010-05-02 16:50
#6
The graphic images of blood and guts are surprising, given that this is TV, not cinema, although I suppose the cadavers on Duckie's autopsy table in NCIS can be pretty gruesome. Compared to say, battlefield images in The Battle of the Bulge, where there are such scenes as a massacre of US prisoners by Germans that takes place in a snowy field, yet there isn't so much as a trace of red on all that whiteness, The Pacific is either pretty realistic, or pretty gory.
Sun, 2010-05-02 18:36
#7
Judging from the vets reviews, realistic and not as gory as some battles they had seen
Wed, 2010-05-05 13:00
#8
That last installment was one big soap opera episode.
Thu, 2010-05-06 00:51
#9
And badly paced with the end battle scene just thrown in without a buildup just a quick backdrop for his death.
Not well done at all
Sat, 2010-05-08 00:52
#10
Cueball
Creators Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who teamed up also on "Band of Brothers" and "Saving Private Ryan," have sought to strengthen the authenticity of Hollywood renderings of World War II. But while such portrayals may give us a keener appreciation of the courage and suffering of U.S. troops on the battlefield, they also add further weight to a lopsided World War II history that leaves the dishonorable part of America's wartime behavior buried deeper in national amnesia.[SNIP]
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said at the time that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man." The inferno was so intense that fleeing victims burst spontaneously into flame and were boiled alive in canals into which they had plunged to escape. Their agonies were no less severe than those suffered at Hiroshima.
Sat, 2010-05-08 00:59
#11
Completely correct Cueball. We also have Dresden and Hamburg on the other front. I would say though, The Pacific does show the de-humanizing of man from war and the not pretty side of the Allied forces as well. Not as much as they should but definitely not the usual Hollywood "we were angels and they were devils" showing
Sat, 2010-05-08 02:41
#12
True but generally a very enjoyable tv series for all that
Sat, 2010-05-08 02:49
#13
Cueball
Speilberg is a master of patriotic manipulation in film. I stopped being a fan after he butchered "Empire of the Sun."
Here Speilberg is normalizing present day atrocities of the US empire by retrofitting them to the central myth of the American Empire in the context of WWII, the "good war" upon which its moral superiority is established in the minds of the American public. In this context we can now see the little blemishes upon the face of the war machine as normal parts of the pursuit of the "good". Things like Abu Ghraib and small massacres of the kind we see in the well known "collateral murder" film can now be put "properly" in their place as an unavoidable part of a greater moral struggle, in which the USA is ultimately cast as the sometimes fallible hero whose heart is in the right place.
Or as Donald Rumsfeld said when his army was watching over the looting of Baghdad: "Shit happens."
To present a picture of Pacific war where US bombers exceeded the daily massacre output of the Auschwitz concentration camp by several times in a matter of hours presents a view of the Pacific war, which naturally brings into question the central theme of the essential "rightness" of the American cause.
Sat, 2010-05-08 03:37
#14
Cueball
I know. Shit happens. I get the feeling that the Japanese don't quite see it that way.
Sat, 2010-05-08 11:43
#15
I mentioned a drama/documentary called Nanking on another thread . While it too is a US film, it hardly raises sympathy for Japanese civilians.
That said, Cueball's point is made in a quote by Captain Haldane in The Pacific, where he tells Sledge that he can tolerate all the horrible things the Marines have to do because "the cause is just."
[ed.] Back to that quote from Cueball's post; while it's important to point out that even Curtis Lemay, the guy in charge of bombing Japan in 1945, said that had the US lost the war he'd have been tried as a war criminal, the bombing campaign goes beyond the scope of this series, which shows the war from the perspective of a particular infantry unit.
Sun, 2010-05-09 19:25
#16
Cueball
Right. In the manner of Band of Brothers, which was actually quite good. But my main point is not about the overall conception of the US a the arbiter of good, but the normalization of attrocity in cause of good, especially the smaller day to day attocities of the kind we see in these latter day "more honest" renderings of WWII.
Speilberg wants to paper over these attrocities that we see ongoing in the present day by contextualizing them in the WWII framework, which by and large we can all agree was a good cause, at least as far as the Allies go. By extension we can also ignore the day to day attrocities of the many ongoing wars in the world today, under the moto of "shit happens".
When William Calley ordered the summary execution of an entire village of Vietnamese civilians American sensibilities of what made their cause moral and just were offended, and perhaps this revelation of attrocity was a little bit causual in the collapse of public support for the war, whereas the "collateral murder" attrocity barely makes a blip on the public radar screen because now we have a much more "realistic" picture of what we endeavour to do when we commit to war, since the American public is more normalized to the idea that "shit happens". In Speilberg's WWII films we can even see that "shit happened" during WWII, where we were definitely on the side of the "right".
One of the fundamental problems with the "shit happens" ethos, is that inevitably it creates for even less and less regard for basic morality, and as such increasingly reduces restraint upon the acts of soldiers in the field.