There actually are, but of the 8 Emmys The Pacific won, this wasn’t one of them (it was nominated but lost to Bored to Death).
Watched BOBs many times and always enjoy it.
Tried to watch two episodes of Pacific and almost fell asleep.
A total bore fest.
I definitely agree with the fractured nature of The Pacific. It was confusing at time trying to figure out the units involved, dates and the leap-frogging nature of the story telling (and I’m a bit of a military buff). That said, it is better on the second viewing.
An interesting note though is a number of reviews I’ve read about The Pacific seem to offer it slightly more praise than BOB. A number of points made are the way it accurately captures the nature of the Pacific conflict. Fighting in alien, total free-fire environments against an equally alien enemy no one knew anything about. This relative to the European theatre which had an environment and culture that was somewhat familiar to the soldiers involved. It was a far more brutal way of fighting (as evidenced by the ‘trophy’ hunting many of the Marines engaged in after a battle).
At the end of the Pacific this is extreme difference noted when the ex-paratrooper (European theatre) cab driver drops Leckie off at his house and refuses payment because of the atrocious conditions the Marines had to put up with in the Pacific.
I’m still partial to BOB, largely because of its fluidity and narrower context (which I think is key when telling a story about WW2).
I didn’t think the violence was gratuitous in context – it just failed to make an emotional impact. It was clinical, if anything, and the miniseries failed to show the emotional transformation, for example, of Sledge. One minute he’s all “God and country, serve with pride, apple pies and American flag” seemingly ten minutes later he’s hacking out gold teeth with his bare hands. Say what? Its interesting that Sledge says the experience is “totally incomprehensible” unless you were there, and I think he’s right.
Compare to the BoB episode which focused on the medic (“Bastogne” I think). It picked up on a character who was, up till then, a minor one, yet conveys the emotional toll of war completely.
That’s contrary to what Sledge said himself on the first page of “With the Old Breed.” He enlisted against his parents wishes, he didn’t serve against his parent’s wishes. They wanted him to finish officer’s training, like his brother who had attended The Citadel (the prestigious Southern war college) and was a 2Lt in the Army.
The show portrays his parents as being entirely against his participation in the war, to the point of intentionally lying to him to prevent him from joining a service, which is wholly inaccurate.
Maybe you can lead us on a narrative on what you are talking about?
Basically, it sounds cooler to go kick some Nazi butts than some Japs’. It’s never about facts there, it’s always about narrative.
In BOB they showed the training so you go to know people before they plunged into combat. That made it easier to follow the characters.
Which perhaps is a good argument for focusing on the Navy instead (both of them perhaps, switching back and forth and perhaps having them fight it out at the end in the Marianas Turkey Shoot)-either a carrier air group or a tour of duty on a sub. Yes I am admittedly biased, but this was primarily a naval war (which is not to disrespect the ground pounders who had to fight desperately if not brutally for various key islands). But the CGI would make it 4x as expensive-I can still keep dreaming of it tho.
I agree with many of the folks in here that mention that BoB’s characters were better defined, and I was easier to make a connection with them. The other thing (for me, at least) was that I am much more familiar with the european campaign than the island hopping campaign, so it was easier for me to follow. Top it off with a BILLION documentaries and specials on channels like the HISTORY Channel focused on the european theater of war, and it was just there, in my mind. When they talked about Bastogne, I knew about Bastogne and wanted to see it.
With that said, I think The Pacific is a much more important miniseries. I knew the generalities of the Pacific campaign, but not the specifics. The Pacific veterans have always been completely overshadowed because they didn’t find jews in concentration camps (among other things), but The Pacific made me appreciate their plight. Fighting in the oppressive heat, against an enemy sworn to defend to the death, water shortages, etc, etc. made a very strong impression on me.
The Pacific has brought to light a campaign that was just as important as the european struggles. And I think the hardships were worse in many cases. I was glad that Spielberg and Hanks did it.
I especially liked the ending, where coming home was difficult for vets. Sledge telling the college girl that he learned to kill Japs and he became very good at it was a classic line, and it underscored a problem that many returning vets had to face… that life had moved on without them. People who never fought in battle couldn’t appreciate what these guys did and what they had gone through.
I have them both on DVD, and I tend to watch the Pacific more now, just to remind myself of the horrors those vets on those tiny little Pacific islands had to go through
I’m just about halfway through The Pacific now - I have to agree that BoB is the better series, but I’m comming to appreciate The Pacific as well.
I guess what strikes me the most is the contrasts, which were no doubt deliberately chosen to portray the contrasting reality - the action in The Pacific is more brutal and seemingly meaningless; the enemy is a cypher to the protagonists, alien beings with whom there cannot be any communication or surrender. There is one moment of shared-type humanity early in the war - when one of the marines picks up a note-book from a Japanese body, and a pic of the man with his GF or wife falls out - but after that, there is a steady sense of dehumanization. The low point, so far at least, is where one of the marines is collecting gold teeth from a japanese solder who is not actually dead yet …
I do get the feeling that the point is somewhat one-dimensional: war is hell and will destroy you in soul if not in body. As others have said, the characters are hard to distinguish, and the action hard to follow - one gets the sense that it almost doesn’t matter to the point the film-makers wish to make, which is a pity.
These past few weeks, we’ve watched first The Pacific, then Band of Brothers back to back on DVD, so I’m just now getting to this poll. I voted “Neither,” because I liked both series about the same. The wife has a slight preference for The Pacific.
Same as was posted earlier, I only had vague notions of the Pacific battles and knew just the big names like Guadalcanal, so I appreciate elarning a bit about the vaguer battles in The Pacific like Peleliu and others. Seeing them back to back really brings out the differences in types of warfare, too.
The wife is fascinated with stuff like this, because Thailand played so little a role in the war, and no one here is taught very much about it. When the wife’s nephew was a teenager 10-15 years ago, he was an ardent pro-Nazi and staunch admirer of Hitler. Reason: The snappy uniforms. Seriously. I think he outgrew that but cannot be sure, because I pretty much banned the little shit from my home. (He’s weird in many other ways, too.) But the wife has learned so much about the WWII era since hooking up with me. Visiting the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor when we were students at the U of Hawaii deeply moved her.
No contest, IMO. BoB was better written, better acted, better shot, better edited. In fact, it ranks as one of the best series ever on HBO.
I have to say BoB. Pacific tried to cover a lot and frankly it didn’t always pan out. BoB focused on on one company while Pacific was all over the map (literally).
The war against the Japanese in Burma was rightly called the Forgotten War. Thailand too was involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_RailwayBurma Railway
Band of Brothers was far superior. In some part because it had a coherent narrative to follow – I think The Pacific could have been better had they focused only on Sledge’s story from “With the Old Breed” (excellent book). Although John Basilone had a compelling story, the compelling part wasn’t the utterly dull stateside scenes he was mostly in for The Pacific.
But I loved both series.
Band of Brothers had a great number of similar inaccuracies. Even if you don’t count Ambrose’s errors, which were many. The writers changed details to “make a better story” – sometimes, with the permission of the people involved (I think Toye’s character got assigned the bit with the brass knuckles, which was actually another guy not featured).
But the one that particularly irritates me in BoB is how they mangled Webster’s story and character to turn him into some stupid hollywood-esque character. He wasn’t on The Last Patrol, and there’s no way he ever would have volunteered for it. In fact, he was somewhat of a goldbrick, and freely admits as much in his book, “Parachute Infantry”. Which was actually used by the BoB writers as a secondary source, so no excuse for not knowing what they’d written wasn’t reality, either.
Yes, Thailand was involved but as a country largely sat out the war while under Japanese occupation. The Death Railway and Bridge over the River Kwai (BTW: The movie was laughable; it was finally destroyed toward the end of the war by aerial bombing) were Japanese operations inside Thailand. Have visited them several times. There are a couple of military cemeteries containg the graves of the prisoners who died working on the railroad, and the province is a mecca on Anzac Day. WWII is only barely touched on in high-school history; it’s only in the past couple of decades that high school even became mandatory.
I liked BOB better, but so do most Americans. We prefer to think of the ETO in Ww2 when we talk about war because we showed up after years of pressure from the soviets, and kicked the hell out of stretched thinner troops. Also, it turns out they were committing horrible atrocities against a third party.
Who wouldn’t prefer to remember that war compared to different wars where the enemy isn’t so clear cut evil?
We popularize World War two more than other wars in our culture, and I think we popularize the European theater IMO.
I dunno, the Japanese gov’t and army in WW2 was plenty evil and committed numerous atrocities against third parties, such as the Chinese, POWs and all those unlucky enough to get stuck in the “co-prosperity sphere”.
Re: “years of pressure from the soviets”. Your history is a little fuzzy here. Germany and the Soviet Union had a pact up until 1941, when Germany invaded. The US became involved in the ETO when it committed troops to the African Campaign in 1942 which eventually brought them to Sicily and into Italy. So it was only one year. The US played an important part in the ETO, but the troops were green and only ‘kicked the hell’ out of the Axis Army because of the joint effort with the British, and to a lesser extent, the French. US troops were seen by both American and allied commanders as having no stomach for war, and it took serious bloodletting before they were truly committed to the effort.
On the Pacific Front, after the initial shock of Pearl Harbor, US forces won most of their engagements against the Japanese, though not without serious losses. The stories of survivors of Japanese prison camps tell about a merciless culture that had no qualms about torture and human degradation, and the Japanese behavior during their occupation of China certainly shows the face of evil.
I think it’s interesting that so many commenters have noted the greater “distance” from the individual characters in, and the “sterility” of, The Pacific. That difference seems to be reflected in the names of the series – one series is named after the characters (Band of Brothers) and the other after a geographic feature (The Pacific).