I have watched Band of Brothers all the way through a good dozen or so times; The Pacific I am currently watching for the 3rd or 4th time right now (Veteran’s Day marathon on HBO).
Which of the two do you like better?
While The Pacific is at least the same quality of Band of Brothers, personally I prefer BoB if given a choice to watch one or the other. BoB seems to me more varied, with more interesting and fun characters. The Pacific all seems to be the same environment, as Pacific islands all pretty much look the same and the characters just weren’t as likeable as in BoB.
Another vote for BoB. I liked the way it followed a single unit from boot camp through the end of the war.
Didn’t care for The Pacific. Found it disjointed and difficult to follow, also thought it had a little too much gratuitous gore–like the scene where a marine is idly tossing something…rocks? Sunflower seeds?..into the remaining part of the skull of a dead Japanese soldier (top of the head was blown off). Or the depiction of soldiers cutting gold teeth out of dead Japanese soldiers. Did like the title sequence for the series though…thought that was worthy of an award, if there are awards for such things.
Band of Brothers by a long mile. Much better characterization, better filming technique. (Pitch-dark battles are no doubt scary to be in, but are impossible to watch, for example) and as has been noted, less interesting characters.
I found The Pacific to be very confusing to watch until I realized it was based on three separate story lines. One story line is from Robert Leckie, another one is from Eugene Sledge, and the third is from someone who fought with John Basilone.
To me, all the characters seemed to look all alike, and so it was not easy for me to follow the action. Perhaps now that I know how it is formed, I might need to take another look at it.
However, the character development throughout BoB is what makes the story so much better.
It was really hard to connect with the characters in “The Pacific.” I can’t explain it. It was, emotionally “flat,” and yeah, I get it, horrors of war and all that, but there just wasn’t anything there to sink your teeth into. The three plots were a bit confusing as well, but I think if I was connecting with the characters, it wouldn’t matter. It ended up being kind of boring. As a side note I thought Snafu was going to rape Sledge in his sleep, through the entire thing. You might think that added dramatic tension, but no.
Also, I found later, a lot of the details were not historically accurate in stupid, weird ways. Sledge was a college freshman in a military academy when he changed his mind and decided to enlist. He was never at any time considered medically unfit, nor did his parents discourage him from the military. They did think he should finish college so as to enter as a commissioned officer. That information is literally in the first 50 words of “With The Old Breed…” Sledge’s book. WTF?
I don’t think they are even close to the same quality. “The Pacific” isn’t worthy to lick the boots of “Band of Brothers.”
I started to watch one episode of The Pacific, that for some reason had some guy having dinner with his girlfriend and her parents, and then slept with her. I’m all for pretty naked chicks on TV, but that bit reminded me too much of “Pearl Harbor”.
*Band of Brothers *had a better arc and better feeling of time passage. That is, from the episodes dealing with the training to the last episodes with the war ending seemed like an endless stretch of time in between. While with The Pacific, it seemed like from the first episode – where the viewer was thrown right into the meat grinder 10 minutes in – to the last episode seemed to me like it could have encompassed a week or so. I just didn’t get the feeling of it being a journey, like in Band of Brothers. And I didn’t really get a sense of depth of the characters, except for the three or four main characters, in The Pacific, where as Band of Brothers came off as much more of an ensemble cast.
I’ve been meaning to snag the BoB Blu-ray for quite some time, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet … no pun intended.
Band of Brothers was brilliant in every aspect: acting, directing, writing, and production values. Having some of the actual vets doing commentary after episodes really connected the viewer to the characters, who, unlike in The Pacific, stood out as individuals without chewing the scenery (David Schwimmer excepted).
I think The Pacific would have benefited by an extra 5 or so episodes (at least). So that we could have at least one character who was a career Marines (preferably an officer or a senior NCO, I’m especially thinking of Red Mike Edson), with the serie starting at Pearl Harbor or before and is later joined by the other characters, going through boot camp and then Guadalcanal, then after 'Canal, some of the 1[sup]st[/sup] Division veterans were transfered to provide the seeds to the 2[sup]nd[/sup] Division, so as to allow us to see the battle of Tarawa, Saipan, a more detailed version of Iwo Jima and so on. The Pacific campaign was so vast and longer than the ETO that they could have pulled it off.
I liked Band of Brothers a lot more when I saw it the 2nd and 3rd time. I think the same is true of the Pacific. I think BOB is better but they are both good. I agree the night battles were very hard to follow.
Another comment: “The Pacific” kind of clearly suffered from its source material in comparison with “Band of Brothers” – BoB was based on one book written by a historian and widely regarded as exceptional for its genre; The Pacific was a pastiche of three books, all first-hand accounts.
Imagine they tried to make a Vietnam mini series based on “A Rumor of War” “We Were Soldiers Once, and Young” and “Born on the 4th of July.” The potential for essentially shallow treatment of large swathes of events, not to mention discordant jumps in tone, is obvious. That “The Pacific” didn’t utterly fail is an impressive achievement.
I thought a great thing about BOB was you never knew who the vets were who were interviewed until the last episode. You didn’t know which guy was Winters, Guarnere, Powers, etc. So you didn’t know who was an officer or a PFC.
For the Pacific almost all of the vets died before the filming began so they could not interview them. Leckie and Sledge both died in 2001.
I love both, but Band of Brothers definitely lends itself to the medium better. The story itself is more cohesive - a single American unit is involved in most of the major battles from D-Day until the end of the war. All of the events (with the exception of the first episode) took place over the course of roughly one year so they didn’t need to pack in the kind of time that The Pacific did.
Ultimately, I think that the Pacific was just a little too ambitious in trying to cover as many facets of the Pacific war as possible. In the process of trying to show Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, it ended up feeling fractured. It tries to get into the heads of three unrelated characters and is unable to fully cover any of them in the way that they deserved.
On the other hand, I didn’t find its violence gratuitous at all - the entire point of the particularly gory scenes (the pebbles in the skull, the carving out of teeth) is to show just how awful and primitive the war was becoming between the two sides. They had ceased to view each other as human and each side was giving in to their most base instincts of brutality and hatred. This is to contrast it with the respect that the Americans had for the surrendering Germans in Band of Brothers - there would be no firm handshakes at the end of the war for these marines. They hated the enemy and the enemy hated them. By the time you get to the Okinawa episode, even Sledge expresses a desire to wipe out the Japanese entirely (“I hope they don’t [surrender]. I hope we get to kill every last one of them.”)
Band of Brothers is a more “typical” war series in that it covers the camaraderie between soldiers as they try to survive their way through a war. The Pacific included a little of that but was more interested in covering the toll that the war took on the marines involved and, particularly, the different ways that it affected each of the three protagonists. You get someone like Leckie, who is a cynical smartass and rulebreaker - he reaches his bottom and is wounded but is able to bounce back after the war. Contrast that with Sledge, who was an idealist that saw his entire world turned upside down and found it hard to return to his old life after the war was over. Along the way you see some men break under the pressure and some men rise to the occasion.
One of the biggest problems for the Pacific is that the weakest episodes are front-loaded at the beginning. You get to midway through episode 4 or 5 and you just think “eh, this sucks” and move on. But it’s the Sledge stuff that is the most brutal and compelling, in my opinion. Episodes 7 (Peleliu) and 9 (Okinawa) are among the best war dramas I’ve ever seen. I wonder if they would have done better to focus entirely on Sledge’s “With the Old Breed” as their source material, though it wouldn’t have told exactly the story they were trying to get across with the Pacific as a whole.
However - it should be noted that the Pacific was relatively accurate in its early portrayal of Sledge. Sydney Phillips claims that Eugene’s heart murmur prevented him from enlisting with him. Also, from an article by a man who interviewed Sledge in his final years:
I don’t know what it is, but movies about the Pacific theater seem to, well “suck” might be too strong, but it’s in the right direction. It’s like the difference between Saving Private Ryan versus Thin Red Line and Flags of Our Fathers. For some reason, broken, dehumanized soldiers slugging it out on some volcanic rock doesn’t make a compelling story for me.
Maybe that’s why the US historically focused more on Europe and Nazi Germany than on Imperial Japan. As a fundamentally narrative-led people, they also thought that it sucked.
Darn, I had a mancrush on him too back then. He looked like a non assholish Steve MC Queen (too bad, him, and most of the BoB cast didnt make a career).
