I just finished watching Band of Brothers, the HBO/Spielberg/Hanks/Ambrose miniseries about a company of US soldiers in Europe from Normandy onwards. I can not recommend it more highly. It was by turns gripping, touching, scary, hilarious, touching, informative, well produced, well acted, well written, and touching.
There were a number of episodes of WWII in Europe that it covered that I’ve never before seen in a movie or TV show:
-The liberation of Holland
-The battle of the bulge
-The discovery, liberation of, and exposure of German civilians to, a concentration camp
-The allied entry into the Eagle’s nest
along with myriad details of the everyday lives of the men, their tragedies (both heroic and tragicomic), their triumphs, etc.
Oh, and it features an excellent performance by a comically-against-type David Schwimmer
Was this discussed elsewhere on the SDMB? I did a boardreader search and all I found was a discussion about a particular episode.
Like what is currently being done with “Enterprise”, there were episode-by-episode discussions from when the series was first run. Looks like we’ve lost those threads though.
I have to say that the series as a whole disappointed me. I thought that it was actually quite boring for the most part. I guess I was hoping for Saving Private Ryan II, which obviously is near impossible to deliver.
The parachute drop the night before D-Day had obvious computer effects, obvious in the “that doesn’t look real at all” kind of way.
There were several intense battle scenes, however, but the production value, although amazing for HBO, was not as good as I’d hoped.
I absolutely without qualification LOVED Band of Brothers. What I think made it so incredible to me is that most war movies follow a group of soldiers through one battle (just long enough for the cute Italian kid who mentions his girlfriend back home to get killed), while this follows them for years of comradery and deals with issues NEVER dealt with in war movies (replacements, points, etc.).
The concentration camp scenes were fantastic. We’ve all seen the b/w film of stacked bodies and living scarecrows so many times that we’re totally inured to it and it’s no more horrifying than the Zapruder films or Challenger explosion or any other deadly video meme in our collective memory. The acting by the soldiers and the use of color film and narrative remind us that once the notion of a concentration camp was completely alien and almost unbelievable to other humans (and this wasn’t even a death camp).
I love the extras on the DVD as well, especially the bio bits and the military glossary. The opening of each episode with elderly men who aren’t identified by name until the last episode was brilliant.
Got the DVDs for Christmas. I had avoided it while it was on HBO because I knew it would be coming out on DVD.
I thought it was fantastic. Better than SPR. I enjoyed the parts outside battle. I thought it was a fantastic visual source for what a frontline soldier went through in foxholes etc.
Rhino, I would suggest giving it another try on DVD. Reason being that it was a lot easier to follow the different characters. As a weekly thing, there were too many guys to follow.
The Germans had an excellent sniper program and they did have scoped rifles. The US had a half-assed sniper program that really wasn’t much of a program at all. In the Pacific they’d just hand a soldier or marine a springfield with a scope and tell him to go kill Japanese snipers.
In BOB when a soldier yells “sniper” that doesn’t mean the person doing the shooting actually went to sniper school. I’d wager that just about any German soldier armed with a mauser could act as a sniper given a good field of fire and proper cover.
I was a huge fan from the time it originally aired on HBO. I received the DVD set for Christmas and have watched the episodes 3x’s now and each time I am completely amazed at all levels of the episodes. The writing, acting, special effects, everything is just brilliant.
The documentary, featuring the real-life Easy Company survivors is worth the price of admission alone. Those tough old birds are real men, and I don’t mind saying I teared up a few times watching it.
I also remember seeing one old fellow’s interview start, and noticed the “E” Company training guidon, or flag framed on the wall behind him, and said to myself “how the hell did he get THAT?”
No, it was Major Winters. Don’t demote the guy for goodness sake.
(Then-Lt.) Dick Winters would’ve been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on D-Day, but for an arbitrary one-MOH-per-division rule for D-Day nominations that prevented it from happening (guess they would’ve had to give them out by the bushel if every deserving soldier got one for that particular action).
Well, Lt. Winters at the time he got the flag; I certainly wasn’t diminishing the man’s very well-deserved rank. His men (both in the documentary and Ambrose’s book) speak very highly of him, both as an officer and as a man.
I saw it the first time around. I recall that I had real trouble telling the various soldiers apart, especially in the earlier episodes before you knew anyone. Everyone especially looked alike with a helmet on.
Also, a good deal of the time I wasn’t clear exactly what was going on in regard to the military maneuvers.
But all-in-all, very good despite all that, which is saying something. I really liked the last three episodes and the documentary after the last one.
There’s also been at least one movie about Operation Market Garden (in Holland): A Bridge Too Far.
I got the Band of Brothers DVD set for Christmas; really excellent, with good features that help a civilian keep track of what’s going on.
As it happens, I watched my DVD of Patton today; that movie definitely gives the impression that the 101st would have been massacred if Patton hadn’t rescued them at Bastogne, but in Band of Brothers they note that nobody in the 101st ever agreed that they needed rescuing.
It might be apocryphal, but someone from the 101st is supposed to have said when learning they were surrounded at Bastogne : “They got us surrounded… The poor bastards !”
I highly reccommend the book too. My favorite character has to be Shifty, the Wisconson farm boy with a dead shot. He picks off a sniper in Episode 8 I think, and in the book, someone remarks that “it would be a bad idea to be on the business end of Shifty’s rifle”.
