The Pacific

A disclaimer I have not seen Band of Brothers, everyone I know has suggested I see it, but I haven't got around to it. I was planning on watching Band of Brothers before I started The Pacific, but I was at a friends as he started watching The Pacific so I decided to watch it, I was underwhelmed. Another disclaimer I generally do not like war movies, I am not a history buff so I don't care for or appreciate the verisimilitude of even the most accurate war films. My blood will boil when Dillon High runs the ball from the 10 with 10 seconds left, but even if I could tell the difference I would be indifferent if British Solider was using a Smith and Wesson.

The Pacific opens showing us soldiers preparing to ship out to war and to me the scenes felt like how people who didn't live through the 40s remember the 40s. I don't think they did this to juxtapose the inevitable war scenes, it just felt like a way to introduce some characters and develop a tone, which I didn't really care for.

Most of the dialogue in the Pacific feels like it should be in Kelly's Heroes and while I realize that 19 year old country boys getting sent off to war wouldn't be discussing Proust on the front line, it seemed like the writers were trying too hard to capture the banality of the conversations. I didn't expect to hear bawdy WC Fields jokes followed by musical theatresque fake-laughing.

Though it has cliche dialogue The Pacific has some very ambitious action sequences. Most movies want the audience to see everything so they can follow the action. The Pacific tries to truthfully recreate the battles by having many fights at night in the dark. The goal is too make the audience feel as uneasy as the soldiers, who don't know where the enemy is, however there is a fine line between making the audience feel uncertain and making the scenes impossible to follow. I wasn't watching on a great TV and my mind may change when I watch this weeks episode in HD, but I struggled following a lot the action in the pilot and often found myself incredibly disinterested during what should have been great action sequences.

A major reason why I am not a huge war movie fan is because they tend to have have the same moral: "War is Hell". Several soldiers are sociopaths and war justifies racism, sadism and other awful elements of human nature or even worse turns ordinary people into cold callous killing machines. I do not want to discuss the accuracy of the message, but the sentiment is trite. I am not particularly interested in seeing The Pacific illustrate the dehumanizing nature of war after I have seen movies like Full Metal Jacket that have done a much better job of it. I maybe holding The Pacific to an impossibly high standard, but given that they aren't trying anything particularly original, there would need to be near flawless execution for me to really love the show. Ultimately The Pacific's moralizing is not particularly compelling, but it is so overt that it can't be ignored. In the pilot the Pacific oscillated between being an ambitious, but flawed popcorn war-movie and an unoriginal guilt trip about war's role in society. I will probably end up watching the whole series as it is only 10 episodes, but thus far it isn't something I would recommend.