Seen as the spritual successor to “Band of Brothers,” Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s new “The Pacific” looks as good as I could imagine. I cannot wait until it comes out.
Here is the new trailer: Awesome!
I liked it the first time I saw it when it was called “The Thin Red Line”.
Just kidding. I look forward to it, it looks great.
*Band of Brothers *was the greatest war movie ever made. If this is only half as good, it’ll be astounding.
I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been really interested in the Pacific ground battles (I’ve just never found the IJA to be as compelling/formidable a foe as the Wehrmacht) so it’ll be interesting to see if this changes that. I’m also interested in seeing how they address some of the uglier aspects of the theater.
The inability of either side (in the Pacific) to even comprehend that there was a vast gulf of misunderstanding between them makes the Pacific Theater a much more fertile ground for story-telling in my opinion. At least the Germans behaved in a way that was somewhat comprehensible to the GIs (leaving out the occasional fanatical SS unit), but there was an almost genetic inability to relate to the Japanese (and vice-versa). This of course, led both sides to demonize the other through-out the war, as the sense of alienness was intense.
I’m looking forward to it. I still pop in the old B of B DVD every now and then. Great viewing. The WW2 pacific theater is closer to my realm of experience and understanding than the European theater, so I’m looking forward to it a lot.
I’ll be all over it, but just once I’d like to see a miniseries give the Navy its due.
It’s hard to give the navy its due because naval warfare is harder to protray dramatically than infantry firefights.
I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, it looks great.
The Battle of Midway is pretty easy to portray dramatically, in my opinion, and of course has been …
Of course most of the battles in the Pacific involving the Navy were either carrier combat with airplanes, the Navy bombing the crap out of some island the Marines were about to land on, or sneaky submarine battles–all of which having been successfully depicted in films.
In recent years, we’ve had three terrific movies about Pacific combat: The Thin Red Line, Flags of our Fathers, and Letters from Iwo Jima and one crappy one, Pearl Harbor.
Why should I get all excited about Spielberg’s new flick, which seems to offer nothing new?
Movie…Depicts Bonding…Depicts Realistic Mayhem…Lush, Tropical setting.
It’s been done quite a bit recently.
I would say we’ve had one good movie about Pacific combat, Letters from Iwo Jima, one mediocre movie about men coming home from Pacific combat, Flags of Our Fathers, and two crappy movies, one (TTRL) much more disappointing than the other, of which little was expected.
Yea, I kinda wish they’d find a new war to make movies about, or, barring that, at least a new part of the Second World War. The only movies I’ve seen about Korea are MASH and the Manchurian Candidate (yea, I’m sure there are others, but none that have caught my notice).
How about a movie based on the facts & the hardships of the Burma campaign in WW2? Yes there was ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’, but there was so much more that happened over there. I never see that story getting told.
I used to enjoy Bridge on the River Kwai. But now that I know what I know about the Japanese treatment of POWs, I just can’t suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
As for Pacific, I noticed that Chesty Puller is listed but no one else that I know. Are the characters fictional or based on real people? Also, William Sadler and John Seda are the only two actors I recognized. I like it when a movie is full of new faces. Let’s me think of the characters instead of the actors.
A significant portion of Flags of Our Fathers did, in fact, depict realistic combat.
Also, I found The Thin Red Line to be an exceptionally interesting war movie; it was also nominated for an Academy Award (but lost to Saving Private Ryan), so certainly I’m hardly alone in this. In any case, TTRL depicted realistic combat in a lush tropical setting.
The Thin Red Line is 78% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes (95% from top critics), 81% from the RT community.
Pearl Harbor has 25% (23%) and 40%, respectively.
So mine is a more mainstream opinion.
Just another reason to get my proposed Orde Wingate biopic off the ground.
It’s a mini-series, not a movie, so like Band of Brothers I’m presuming we’re going to be following a group of Marines as they train up and then island-hop across the Pacific over the course of 10 or 12 hours of television. I think what’s new is the opportunity for breadth of coverage more so than a 2.5 hour long movie can provide.
Band of Brothers set a pretty high bar for Pacific to follow, and I presume since the same group of people are in charge, they’ll manage to do it.
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Well, that is an excellent point.
Actually, they both lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love, though 4 of the other Oscars it was nominated for (Director, Cinematography, Editing, Sound) did go to SPR.