HBO's The Pacific is finally here!

I usually try to keep the content of this blog as light as possible, but last night's premier of HBO's The Pacific, a follow-up to the groundbreaking mini-series Band of Brothers, deserves to be treated seriously and respectfully. Like Band of Brothers, The Pacific is produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, and tells the stories of several groups of Marines fighting for their country and for survival in the Pacific Theater of World War II. The episode begins with a short introduction, voiced-over by Tom Hanks, explaining the significance of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. retaliation against the Japanese on the island if Guadalcanal (which is where the Marines in the show are being sent to fight) which, like Band of Brothers, included footage of interviews with the surviving soldiers. Like the show itself, I would like to begin this review with a bit of a preamble, so please bear with me. Here it goes.

I am, by no means, a history buff or a WWII expert but movies and shows about this particular conflict are always particularly resonant with me. I think it has something to do with the simplicity of it all. Unlike any of the military conflicts that I (or even my parents, for that matter) have been alive for, there seems to be no moral dilemma (aside from the dilemma inherent anytime men are tasked with killing other men) at play. The good guys (us) and the bad guys (the Nazis, the Japanese) are so well defined that even the current citizens of the countries who were the bad guys would admit that their grandfathers were in the wrong. Unlike Vietnam, or Iraq there is no question who was right and who was wrong. And this concept allows for the men who fought this war to be considered to be, and portrayed as, true heroes (which makes for great television). As much as I respect and commend the service of my peers who are currently fighting in the name of our country, the fact that the reasons for their sacrifice are so ambiguous, and very likely morally deficient, will keep them from being remember by history as the same type of hero that we remember the men who fought in Europe and the Pacific to have been. By no means is this our soldiers fault, it is clearly the fault of our government and of our society as a whole for putting them in this situation (although, it is now an all volunteer military....anyways I am digressing). The point of all this is: movies and TV shows about WWII have the luxury of a sense of good vs. evil in our collective psyche that movies about Iraq just don't. I would take a movie about a bunch of Americans scalping Nazis over one about a group of guys trying not to get blown up by IEDs in Baghdad any day of the week.

(Just a quick aside: I think I might be the only person on earth who didn't like The Hurt Locker. I thought it was tense and suspenseful, but it lacked any coherent story arc. They could have taken any of those scenes in the middle of the movie and swapped the order in which they were shown and it wouldn't have affected the movie one iota. Plus, and maybe I am stupid and just missed it, but what the fuck was the movie saying about the war? What was the point? Bigelow could have followed some soldiers around for 6 months, video taped them, provided absolutely no context to what she was showing us, and came up with nearly the same movie. If anyone who reads this agrees with me, please let me know, because I am starting to think I am crazy for not fawning over this movie.)

Now that I got my thoughts about WWII, and shows about it, out of the way, let's move to The Pacific. I will keep this part short and sweet, with a paragraph summarizing what little plot we have been shown so far and follow that with a sentence-long review.

As I stated before, The Pacific is about a bunch of Marines, who are tasked with stopping the Empire of Japan from expanding to Australia. A powerful scene at the beginning of the episode features a commanding officer addressing a room full of non-commissioned officers. He sums the premise of the show up better than I ever could by saying, "The Pacific will be our theater of war. We will do battle with the Japs on tiny specks of turf that we have never heard of...Merry Christmas, Happy 1942". The first half of the episode introduces the audience, without much fanfare or back story, to a handful of the Marines, that include PFC Robert Leckie, Sgt. J.P. Morgan, PFC Sidney Phillips, Sgt. Basilone and Sgt. Manuel Rodriguez. We see Basilone eating a celebratory dinner with his family in New Jersey. Leckie is praying in a church before he runs into his neighbor Vera, who he promises to write to while he is overseas. We meet Eugene Sledge in Alabama after he is diagnosed by his doctor father with a heart murmur, which initially keeps him from joining his friend Phillips in combat. The remainder of the episode deals with the soldiers landing on the island of Guadalcanal and surviving (and, in some cases, not surviving) the first week or so of the war. The Japanese Navy has beaten back all of the US Naval ships from the coastline, stranding the Marines with little supplies and back-up.

I don't even really think any review of the episodes will be necessary, because I am sure they will all, like the premier, kick ass. The only criticism I can come up with is that all of the characters were introduced so quickly, it is a little tough to keep track of who is who when the bullets start flying and their faces are obscured by dirt, blood and helmets. I have a suspicion that The Pacific, like Band of Brothers, will be one of those shows that you have to watch a few times to get the full effect. That said, I can't wait for the second part of the mini-series and I will update you all as soon as it airs.