HBO's 'The Pacific' (Tom Hanks & Steven Spielberg) Premieres

[Jamie Tainton]

HBO's 10-part mini-series, 'The Pacific,' a follow-up to 'Band of Brothers' and also exec-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, is set to debut on Sunday, March 14 at 9:00PM Eastern and Pacific Time.

We're looking forward to watching this mini-series!
Official HBO website for 'The Pacific' (with trailers): http://www.hbo.com/#/the-pacific/index.html/

This ten-part mini-series premieres tomorrow night (or tonight, depending on where you are). That's Sunday, March 14th at 9:00 PM.

This should be an excellent mini-series! Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are in charge, so I expect every bit of the quality of "Band of Brothers." If you don't have HBO, this might make it worth ordering for a few weeks. This will be high-quality television.

[Jamie Tainton]

So I watched the first episode and I thought it was pretty good- looking forward to more episodes.
I saw on some other boards there were some complaints but the fucking thing just started!
There were some pretty graphic scenes like this one- where the guy has had his head cut off and into the mouth the castrated cock and balls have been inserted. (TV has sure changed since I was a kid!! )
Did they do that back then? Or was that from Vietnam.
Or have warring countries always performed such acts of ugliness?

Warning, although this is from a TV show and though it is not real, it is graphic. Don't look any further if you think this will effect you.







another showing an Officer loss it under combat

[Darren Gawle]

I believe that particular (mutilation) scene is based on an excerpt from Eugene Sledge's With The Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa on which The Pacific is partly based - although, I read that it is, rather than basing it on firsthand knowledge of the Sledge book. A related book which I doubt will have been referenced for this miniseries is William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness which tracks his career as a Marine fighting from Tarawa through Peleliu to Okinawa. There's a particularly creepy part of the book set on Okinawa where as a dispatch runner, Manchester is pinned down, alone, by a Japanese sniper who keeps yelling "One Two Three! You can't catch me!!!" at him.

I am keeping an open mind watching this miniseries - I mean, I've pretty much given up on ever seeing a war movie that's accurate by any stretch of the imagination - I can already (without having read any of Leckie's writing, and therefore without the benefit of knowing what's to come) see that the Bob Leckie character is headed for PTSA, which is, from what I understand, partly the angle of The Pacific as a cinematic undertaking. Unlike Band of Brothers, this is not necessarily going to pay homage to the fighting men of WW2 via the exploits of E Coy., 506 PIR, but rather look at what almost unimaginable horrors fighting men have to endure, and then what happens when they're sent back home and expected to fit back into the lives they left behind when the war started.

That said, I'm always amazed when somebody who couldn't tell Akira Kurosawa from a dead crab all of sudden thinks they've got a Ph.D in film studies because they can tell a rebuilt OT-810 from an SdKfz 251.

[Jamie Tainton]

[Jamie Tainton]

[Darren Gawle]

By the way, that Kurosawa comment wasn't a slight on you! I just re-read it and felt somebody might read it that way... as it happens, I think Kurosawa directed probably the best combat scene ever (my opinion of course) in Ran, the one where all you hear is the symphonic score playing with the images of battle moving across the screen like a nightmarish ballet, until one of the brothers is shot and then it's absolute mayhem. I've read one reviewer who accused Spielberg of ripping this scene off twice in Saving Private Ryan when Capt. Miller goes kind of deaf and just watches the battle unfold around him.

[Guy DeYoung]

I don't expect this to be as coherent a story as was band of Brothers. That series was based on a specific unit and a fairly well documented series of events. heck they were even able to show interviews with some of the actual veterans. As noted earlier in this thread, this series looks to be a synthesis of several books by veterans from different units and different periods in the war. That leads me to believe that there will be a whole lot more "artistic license" taken with Pacific than they did with BoB. That said, I'll certainly be watching and will buy the series when it is inevitably released on DVD.

[Jamie Tainton]

A link to a board discussions on this series
http://www.pacificfans.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3