Did anyone watch the new HBO Band of Brothers style Miniseries "The Pacific" tonight?

I really liked the bootcamp episodes of BoB, so I regretted not getting to see that. This episode was somewhat uneventful, and I didn't really care about their home life, as we also learned about that through the soldiers in BoB.

I know I'm comparing a lot, but I really thought the way they handled it in the original was far better.

I wish I got HBO :(.

good thing they are showing it again tonight... they've been advertising it but they kept forgetting something important from those ads

THE MOTHER****ING DATE AND TIME

I thought it was good. I'm easy to please though.

This series is a completely different beast than Band of Brothers. Not going to be following a single company, but three Marines from the 1st Marine Division who served over the course of the entire war.

I've read the two books they used as source and they were phenomenal.

Given that this is a 10 part series, judging a single episode is premature. It's really going to need the whole series for context. Seeing guys at home before the war will be critical as far as what the war did the them.

The Pacific is going to be an interesting interest beast for sure. I was reading reports that this one has more "American bias" than the other, but frankly, I kind of could see why. A lot of people think the Nazi's were horrible horrible people (and what they did do to the Jews and Soviets was terrible), but the Japanese in my opinion overshadowed them. Their POW camps were much worse than German ones, they frequently just killed thousands of their citizens (I think almost killing more than double the Chinese than the Germans killed jews during WWII), engaged sometimes in cannibalism under the orders of their commanders, Unit 371, engaged in slave labour/prostitution/rape often, etc, etc. Now the Nazi's share some of these traits, but definitely not the treatment of POWs, cannibalism, and I'm pretty sure regular Germans weren't being instructed to take grenade out and choose suicide over surrender. That's why the soldiers in the Pacific really had some balls. Either be taken to a camp where almost 30% of prisoners died (compared to low single digits for German ones), or pretty much get your face blown off by some civilian yankin' the pin on a grenade. I'm sure they were quite edgy.

I have a feeling we are going to see some gruesome stuff. It's a whole different style of fighting and war. I always found the Pacific to be much more disheartening experience than the German. I wonder if they will show the Death March as an episode this season.

Edit: Just finished watching first episode. Good stuff, looks to be very intense

[url]WWW.LETMEGOOGLETHATFORYOU.COM[/url]

No Death March. This series will cover Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Peleliu and Okinawa through the eyes of three Marines: John Basilone who served at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, Robert Leckie, who served and Guadalcanal and Peleliu and Eugene Sledge, who served and Peleliu and Okinawa.

it still would have been a good idea for them to mention the date and time

when you don't mention a date/time people get the impression it's not starting any time soon and might not rush to google it or may forget to google it

so stop being a dick

yeah

happydick

at happydud = BOOM, PEACE KID

how can I get a hold of this if I don't have HBO

Every ad I saw for it had a date.

I saw ads for it that said "coming soon to hbo" and that was it. I thought it was months away.

torrents

megavideo

legal option: wait for the dvd/bluray release

illegal option: already mentioned

alternate legal option: wait until history channel shows it

nvm found one

what if we live in a country where the history channel doesnt broadcast things that arent at the very least a docudrama, and there are no plans for a local dvd or blu-ray release?

>.> <.<

Channel Seven in Australia.

yeah, I prefer to have my tv shows not be almost 1/3 advertisments (with the frequencey thereof getting greater as the show goes on), not to mention that as it is an HBO show, the only way that it wont have anything cut from it would be for it to be broadcast

For some reason, I am anticipating this to be ****.

I suspect they will get all sorts of things wrong, and as long as they get the vibe right, that's okay.

But, I swear to god, if they do not get John mother****ing Basilone right, I am going to go ape**** and kill every mother****er involved with the show.

I am excited for people to realize that as ****ed up as amphibious assaults like Normandy were in Europe, that **** happened with much greater frequency in the Pacific. And no french p-, uh, pastries, waiting in Paris down the line.

I'll Netflix it once it shows up.

Hope this thread isn't too dead.

I am enjoying it so far, but to be honest its confusing to follow since they follow different groups of soldiers, but at least they only have about 4 really main characters as far as I can tell.

The battles at night are too hard to tell whats going on..

who would have thought it would be hard to tell whats going on when it's dark

The Battle of Alligator Creek, from the first episode, was tough to follow if you don't know who the players were, but the battle in the second episode was pretty much all John Basilone.

Three main characters:
Robert Leckie was a machine gunner at Alligator Creek
John Basilone was the guy who held off the Japanese attack in the second episode and was then awarded the Medal of Honor
Eugene Sledge has yet to feature prominently because he wasn't yet enlisted. He features very prominently the rest of the series.

I've liked the series so far. It follows Leckie's book pretty closely, though they had to cut a lot to make it fit into a 10 part series that is shared with two other Marines.

I am really not feeling this series. I've watched the first four episodes and I just can't get into it (I did like Part IV, however). I want to like it, I want to love it. I think it comes down to not particularly caring for the characters (and I know that's terrible because they're based off people who sacrificed a lot), but a lot of the characters just aren't likable like those in Band of Brothers.

Sorry, I know i worded that in a moronic way, I meant to say that its hard to tell whats going on because we haven't gotten to know all of the characters yet. The first episode had that night battle and I was completely lost on what everyone was doing, same with the second, even though I knew about Basillone before the episode.

Band of Brothers, had a small nighttime fighting sequence in the 2nd episode with the horse carriage, it was decently lit to tell that Gaurnere was on a rampage. The second was in part 5, focusing on Winters who we could see clearly.

The lead actors are kind of forgettable in The Pacific. I officially think this show is starting slow. BoB made me care about the characters in a way that made the less action-oriented episodes entertaining and engaging. These characters are unlikeable, and their scenes are expository instead of meaningful or entertaining. Lots of forced relationships and situations that were handled far more eloquently in BoB.

The camera work feels completely different, too. Almost cheesy in contrast. I think they're trying to use a specific color palette that reminds of Japanese watercolors to avoid the gritty war colors that have become a cliche, even though they pulled them off perfectly in BoB.

I can't help compare when the reason I was excited about this show is because the people from BoB were doing it, and that was quite possibly the best single stand alone piece of media ever created, in my opinion. This feels like par for the HBO course.

Stop bathing for a day or so and then TA-DA!

The next 5 episodes are supposed to be crazy intense.

My take on the Pacific so far:

I've found myself much more involved in The Pacific characters, whether that is a good or bad thing. I think this can pay off depending on how the next episodes play out. Band of Brothers to me was quite disposable in that I could watch any episode out of sequence and do pretty well understanding things because I don't they concentrated so much on the same characters (like so far we have been exposed to in the Pacific). That being said, I like Band of Brothers more at this point, and the characters in the Pacific are starting to get on my nerves a bit.

Pacific is definitely slower paced it seems than BoB, and seems so far to deal more with the day to day lives of soldiers, rather than the actual going ons of the war and fighting. It's starting to reach that point where we are starting to see I think more of the meat of the war as well as it's effect on the characters, but until now I agree with a lot of people in that it's been a lot of forced situations and mulling around.

However, I will of course let it play out. I still will be watching it every Sunday. A lot of the Pacific theatre does deal with the environment vs soldiers, so unfortunately this might be the pace that show maintains :/

That episode was riveting, but wow the CGI was bad. I really liked the running cam-shots.

I've decided the last two episodes, if less contrived, could have been one quality episode instead.

They weren't really contrived.

The 2 minute relationship? The guy going off duty and giving an obviously drunk guy his gun? The main character witnessing a basically anonymous suicide since we barely even established who the characters are. The rebellious boy with a heart condition and his expository conversation with his father. It all feels very tacky and paint by numbers.

kirby does realize this is not a complete work of fiction but instead based on books written by two of the characters right?

specifically the "main character" (AKA "obviously drunk guy") and the "rebellious boy with a heart condition"

I love you, Jim. I don't tell you that enough.

That was a period of many months, the the woman was a composite character. Chuckler did give Leckie his gun while Leckie was drunk and Leckie pulled it on an officer. It happened. Life was hell on Gloucester. Who the guy was isn't important. Sledge did have a heart condition that prevented him from initially enlisted.

Just about everything we've seen so far comes straight from Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie and With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. These two also happen to be two of the main characters.

My bad, it happened exactly how it was written and directed. There is no amount of interpretation or effective story telling that could have changed the believability or pacing of the exact same ideas. I had no idea these were automatically flushed fleshed out characters just because they're named after real people.

Or I think they told the story in the least interesting way possible, and didn't make me believe any of the events we saw happened that way. I know it's based on real events, I'm pretty sure it was called WWII. I realize how the claim of contrived plot elements might seem to apply to the events that actually happened, but the overt way those main points are expressed is far less believable and experienced as it could have been. Band of Brothers had a discussion about religion that played throughout one of the 3rd or 4th episodes and it was very subtle, and didn't have to smack you in the face like the off-handed comments in this.

Honestly, I'd compare it to how I myself write poor dialogue from past conversations. It's a cheesy beat-by-beat re-enactment that tells the audience about everything without showing it. It's an easy way to include all of the things we notice in real life. It's over-writing without trusting the actor or the director to do their job or the audience to think for themselves.

[/not as serious sarcasm as it reads]

yeuck it bothers me when people say 'flushed out' in that context... Isn't the term 'fleshed out'?