I have been meaning to write about this for several weeks but kept putting it off in the hope that things might improve. It was billed as 'The television event of the year' by Sky which in Skyspeak translates to 'we've paid a shedload of money for this and we are going to cram it into every nook and cranny in the schedule'.
The big selling point is that this is Band of Brothers but in the Pacific theatre. Once again we have Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks behind the scenes and a cast of largely unknown actors in front of the camera. The problem is that the world has changed since Band of Brothers which was a product of the pre-9/11 mindset; now with America mired in a morale sapping conflict it seems a harder sell to an audience watching combat footage on the nightly news.
Narratively there are big issues too. Band of Brothers, as the title suggests, is about a tight-knit group of men who participate in a twelve-episode story that lasts just under eleven months - June 1944 to May 1945. That is bound to make for a gripping cohesive storyline. In The Pacific, however, eleven months often elapse between episodes and the cast is much more widely dispersed in a conflict which is much less well known to its audience. It's hard to care about characters when you don't see them for weeks at a time.
I'm glad I waited to write this because the past three episodes - five, six, and seven - have seen the series hit something of a stride. These three programmes cover the bloody battles on the tiny island of Peleliu, an action I had never heard of before. This is essentially the war in the Pacific in microcosm, the action is relentless and brutal and astonishingly violent. Spielberg has been here before in Saving Private Ryan so he knows the audience is almost unshockable but he still manages to jolt the viewer with a combination of unrelenting bombardment and individual moments of horror such as a group of soldiers killing a wounded comrade to prevent him giving away their position to the enemy.
This I suspect is the series as it should have been, especially in the sense of it being a young soldier's baptism of fire. The combat is interwoven with moments of sincere friendship and genuine tenderness that makes some of the forced patriotism ring extremely hollow. However no one would go for a three hour miniseries in this day and age so we have ten episodes whether we need them or not - so much better for the box set sales.
But it is in this tryptych of episodes that The Pacific shows what it might have been and it becomes a more frustrating experience because of that.
