Yeah, even then comedians that were not part of the movie complained:
“England is the place that Churchill visits when he leaves America. That man travels so much. He’s been in Casablanca more than Humphrey Bogart.”
-Bob Hope.
To be fair to the movie, I thought Bernard Montgomery was a perfect comic relief foil – your typical arrogant yet incompetent blowhard English aristocrat. But they went too far in putting him in charge of all Allied ground forces – I mean, who would buy it?
And him proposing the whole Arnhem “bridge too far” adventure? I can see him fucking it up, but not actually proposing it or advocating for it.
It isn’t a plot hole, but I do have a complaint about wardrobe. Clearly, they went all out with the designer Nazi threads. They were stylish and let you know they were evil at the same time. However, it seems the budget was blown by using Hugo Boss and the allied troops ended up with stock uniforms.
And wasn’t there something about the English wearing shorts and pith helmets? In a shooting war? Somebody dropped the ball there.
The whole “atomic bomb” storyline was just an excuse to open up the movie for some location shots that didn’t fit anywhere else – Princeton, Chicago, the Tennessee Mountains, that really good shot of the New Mexico desert. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a beach scene.
I liked this part, though. Again, there’s an element of the randomness and capriciousness of fate going on, but I think the idea here is that the loudest blowhards on both sides tended to be flawed; Montgomery was shown to be pretty skilled in episode 2.06, “Road To Tunisia,” and you saw a lot of weird pros and cons with guys like Patton and the dude in the Pacific story, whatshisname, MacMurray? McDonald? Something. The louder or more pompous they were the dumber they were.
The QUIET guys were the really superior leaders; Guderian, Omar Bradley, and the Japanese guy from the Pacific story… Yanamoro? Yana something. The one who died in the plane crash; it’s in Episode 3.02, “Islands of Blood.” There’s a message of substance over style, sizzle over steak.
The cast change for the British PM in the last episode. Can anyone even remember the name of the guy? Churchill wins the British the war and we’re supposed to believe that in the first election they get they vote him out! At least Roosevelt had a poignant death scene as opposed to being unceremoniously put on a bus.
Rumour has it that the producers finally got tired of the drinking on set in a case of real life writes the plot.
They should have reversed the finales for Roosevelt and Churchill. It just seems so much more American to tell the guy in charge, “Yeah, you won the war, but that was last week. What have you done for me this week?”
Sorry, I had some of my episode numbers and titles mixed up. Here is the full list:
SEASON 1
1.01 “The Corporal” (2-hour pilot)
1.02 “Uncle Joe”
1.03 “Poland, My Poland”
1.04 “Phoney War”
1.05 “Right Man, Right Time”
1.06 “The Quisling”
1.07 “Through The Ardennes”
1.08 “Off The Beach”
1.09 “Their Finest Hour”
1.10 “Desert Crossing”
1.11 “Axis of the Willing”
1.12 “A Storm In The East”
SEASON 2
2.01 “June 22, 1941”
2.02 “The Arsenal of Democracy”
2.03 “The Land of the Rising Sun”
2.04 “The Frozen Army”
2.05 “East Wind, Rain”
2.06 “Siege”
2.07 “Midway”
2.08 “The Two Deserts”
2.09 “Enigma”
2.10 “Blood In the River, Part I”
2.11 “Blood in the River, Part II”
2.12 “The Final Solution”
SEASON 3
3.01 “From Carthage to Rome”
3.02 “A Thousand Tanks”
3.03 “Ironbottom Sound”
3.04 “Europe Ablaze”
3.05 “Il Duce E Deposto”
3.06 “Scorched Earth”
3.07 “Geysers of Blood”
3.08 “Italian Sun”
3.09 “Kursk”
3.10 “Rosie the Riveter”
3.11 “Forward, Comrades”
3.12 “Thousand Bomber Raid”
SEASON 4
4.01 “Across A Frozen Lake”
4.02 “A Little Girl’s Diary”
4.03 “From Tuskegee To Ramitelli”
4.04 “The Jungles Of Burma”
4.05 “The First U.S. Army Group’s Inflatable Tank Division”
4.06 “Crusade”
4.07 “Bagration”
4.08 “Bocage Country”
4.09 “Kamikaze!”
4.10 “Resistance”
4.11 “Camps”
4.12 “Vive La France”
SEASON 5
5.01 “The Manhattan Project”
5.02 “Lieutenant Volkov’s T-34”
5.03 “A Bridge Too Far”
5.04 “A Starving Nation, And On Fire”
5.05 “Down In The Bunker”
5.06 “Nuts”
5.07 “How To Divide The World”
5.08 “The Road To Berlin”
5.09 “Across the Rhine”
5.10 “Black Sand”
5.11 “Next to the Body of His Poisoned Dog”
5.12 “…And I Remember, From the Bhagavad Gita”
Jeez, you guys are picky. I thought it was pretty good myself. Yes, there were a few plot holes. And a few cliches (the good guys win in the end, the hero gets the girl).
But there was some good acting- the Roosevelt character and the Churchill character both delivered some pretty good monologues. And I liked the special effects, especially considering they used no CGI.
I did get tired of the endless reruns on The History Channel. In fact, I quit watching that channel years ago because of it. Is it still playing?
Another problem was with the whole Manhattan project subplot. Here you had the greatest scientific brain of all time (at least, this Einstein character was portrayed as such), the one who tells the president that the US needed to build the superweapon, and who was kicked out of Germany after being persecuted by the Nazis and has every reason to want them defeated, yet you don’t ask him to take part at all.
And there was that ship – the Normandy or something – that caught fire in New York harbor in the middle of the war, and they claimed it wasn’t sabotage. Right.
It also seemed strange that they rounded up all the Japanese-Americans and put them into camps, yet didn’t do the same for the German-Americans.
Originally the plan was to make two more sequels, if you can believe it. Most reviewers were of the opinion that no matter what they put in the third one, there just won’t be enough material for a sequel after that.
Actually, they realized the script for WW III: The Sequel only amounted to about 30 minutes screen time, most of it missile contrails and people looking up at streaks in the sky. They decided there wasn’t much point to shooting it.
Then the came up with The Cold War, which wasn’t really a sequel but had a much more interesting plot.
The Cold War was great at first. The build up. The suspense. The understated drama. Then at the end the bad guys went “meh, fuck this, we give up, you win”. You know Stephen King was ghost writing that shit.
The script writers wrote themselves into a corner when they introduced the “atomic bomb”. Realistically, how could they have another war series without the atomic bomb trumping everything? *The Cold War *sort of handwaved this away by having America sit around with it’s thumb up it’s rear for four years until the Soviet Union secretly developed it’s own atomic bomb, and then had “strategic deterrence” be the reason why they never used them again.
I think they largely got themselves out of that corner in a couple of ways. First the bombs are difficult and expensive to make and it’s hard to hide both the construction and testing of them. Also, there’s lingering toxicity that can blow on the wind and affect air, food, and water. If you use it on your neighbors, or use it too often at a distance, it will come back to bite you.
This made it possible to continue writing about more conventional warfare.
Admittedly, that conventional warfare is still more limited because there’s the fear that countries pushed into a last stand situation will still use the bombs out of desperation.
I think some of you guys are taking this way too seriously.
Sometimes you want a nuanced story, with moral dilemmas and the bad guys having a realistic motive beyond, “Hey, let’s be evil for the sake of being evil.” And sometimes you just want lots of explosions, underdog good guys beating up bad guys, and a bucket of popcorn. Sure, that Evil Hitler Death Nazi of Doom is pretty cartoonish, but didn’t that make it more satisfying when things started going wrong for him?
I was disappointed by the way they just had him kill himself in his bunker. I was hoping for a desperate hand-to-hand combat with a lone Allied hero, or at least a trial. It’s just not satisfying that way, and I don’t know why they decided to do that. At least we got to see those ten other guys hang.
I think they were trying to make it seem ambiguous in case they wanted to use him in the sequel.
Pure Whedonesque fanservice, like USS Enterprise was for the Trekkies and Hitler was for the Charlie Chaplin fans. Personally, I don’t like my tastes being manipulated like that.
Don’t get me started. A loose cannon mid-level commander, who looks like a parody of colonial British military, annoys the top brass so much that to get rid of him they back his idea to (and I can hardly bring myself to type this) land thousands of men by *glider into the jungle *behind enemy lines? And supply them by paradrops? Did I mention this was in the middle of the freakin’ Burmese jungle? Hello? Exactly how did the writers expect that to work?
But sometimes the pendulum swings too far the other way with regards to the perils of the jungle. Hundreds of Japanese being eaten by crocodiles? It only works as an obvious homage to the equally implausible Battle of the Bees.