I got to see the first episode of The Pacific, the new show on HBO about WWII, last night. Of course, I held really high expectations; it’s not just TV, it’s HBO. And once again, I was not disappointed. HBO’s The Pacific was …
fantastic and awe-inspiring, just as all of the HBO miniseries are. It starts you off in the homes of some of the NCO’s that will be shipping off to the Pacific Islands with the Marines. As you meet their families and get to know them, you soon find themselves on their ship in the middle of the ocean, about to disembark and make contact with the Japs. The “taste” of their families that you get is far from the actual truth of the war – brutal, dehumanizing and violent. This kind of cinematography is what I expect from HBO, nothing less.
On Guadalcanal Island, the troops are dug in at night when they are suddenly attacked by the Japanese from the other side of a small water hole. Just like the Japanese in the war, they attempted to cross in order to engage in hand-to-hand combat although they were held back. Even just watching the scene take place made you feel as if you were there. The visual effects were great and the surround sound was precise and accurate.
HBO is known for making such awesome shows. Take, for example Band of Brothers, the great miniseries about the 101st Airborne division and their invasion of Normandy. Or John Adams, about our previous President and one of the greatest Americans of all times. Or Generation Kill, about the Iraq War invasion. They don’t mess up. They don’t use cheap equipment. It’s not TV, it’s HBO.
Jay Booshay
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Any comparison to Winds of War and War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Remembrance
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Never read them during high school unfortunately and haven’t gotten the time to recently.
Any comparison to Winds of War and War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_War
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.-= The Digital Life & Tools Blog´s last blog ..Should Laptops Be Banned from College Classes? =-.
Oops, it looks like a double post there.
Anyway, I was trying to refer to the miniseries version of the books. Here’s a better link for that:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096725/
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Saw 2and to last episode of The Pacific (Okinawa) . I appreciate that they showed the god-like Marines wallowing in the mud, and shit, and rotting maggot ridden corpses of not only their fellow Marines, but the Jap soldiers , AND civilians. This should be REQUIRED VIEWING for EVERY HIGH SCHOOL KID. You wanna go to war? Played a lot of video games? Any of those games involve wallowing in SHIT and ROTTING CORPSES? I’m really disturbed by this Fox News faux “Gung Ho” Hollywood shit. I remember reading about some Marines who survived Iwo and Pleleliu and Okinawa and being EJECTED from a movie house when the saw “Sands Of Iwo Jima” with John Wayne, and couldn’t help viewing it as a COMEDY and laughing out loud. The trailer/intro to the last episode (#10), interviewed a spouse and daughter of a vet who vividly remember their dad/husband screaming in the night after awakening from a war nightmare. Boy, that strikes home. My dad’s recurring nightmare (according to my mom), was the officer walking down the path at their airbase in England, whose duty was to awake crews that had been chosen for that day’s mission (nightmare). Just recently, in my dad’s current state of dementia, he could actually comment on that nightmare: the dream/nightmare was that he could WILL the officer to bypass their Quonset Hut and go on to some other unfortunate bastards, which, of course, came with its own guilt.
wow, thanks for sharing that experience. i agree with you 100%. we barely learned anything about the pacific theatre in high school. there should definitely be more education in primary school about the realities of that theatre. have you been enjoying the rest of the series?