The Pacific

A lot of gunfire coming out of the woods. It's dark. I'm scared.

 

The links for episode one are all broken now. The HBO site is only showing a recap.

Any other links?

 

Watched the first two episodes and was disappointed. Great war scenes but otherwise surprisingly boring.

 

I think the more interesting part of war in Pacific are the naval battles.

 

Seconded. I also find the characters hard to follow and really get into.

 

I SO want to like this more than I do. John Basilone remains a local hero where I grew up. I agree that it was a lot ''easier" to follow and get into the stories of "Easy" Company.

 

I'm in the same boat. For one thing, I think the battle scenes are shot way too dark. I didn't realize until I read Sepinwall's blog that all that stuff going on in Episode 2 was happening to one guy (Basilone), and thus why he's regarded as such a hero.

Along those lines, "The Pacific" suffers because you didn't get two episodes focusing on training so that you could get to know the soldiers a little bit before they started fighting and dying, the way you did in "Band of Brothers." You're not familiar enough with the characters before they're fighting in the dark and covered with mud, and thus you can't identify them easily.

 

Yeah, I think they really wanted to avoid being accused of simply following the BoB "formula" to the point that they've skipped over a lot of important character development.

Maybe it'll grow on us when we watch the episodes a few more times, but neither episode so far has been anywhere near as good as ANY BoB episode.

 

From what I've read, the nature of the Pacific theater - and thus these episodes - is that soldiers came and left so often. So you couldn't do this series like Band of Brothers, which followed the same guys throughout. No matter how you did it, the names and faces would change throughout (if you wanted to keep the realism).

That being said, I don't think these hold a candle to Band of Brothers (yet), but that's probably because:

1. Band of Brothers was just that great.
2. The Pacific theater isn't as interesting a subject matter as the European theater.

I don't know nearly as much about the Pacific as Europe, which was one reason I was looking forward to this series. Still am, because I know even if it can't meet up to the Band of Brothers standard, it will still be among the best produced stuff on TV.

 

I had trouble getting into Band of Brothers.

 

Does it hurt that it's on weekly? Would it be easier to follow or get more into if you watched it every day?

 

I don't know, maybe. Didn't hurt Band of Brothers ... couldn't wait for that thing to come on every week.