Posted on 11/11/2010 11:57:37 AM PST by NavyCanDo
Nimitz eventually was against the invasion, but MacArthur insisted & the marines went ahead with the job.
Consumed many Guadacanal & Pt Glouster vets.
My uncle was in Underwater Demolition in WWII. After that he was a pipe fitter who worked all over the midde east. I was very young at the time but I remember he said something once after he had come back from Saudi Arabia. He was talking to the other men while having a beer and cleaning blue crabs at my dads bay house in Texas. He said "because of their crazy religion some day we will be fighting them in the streets". I hope he was wrong.
Thought a lot of the combat scenes were quite well done. The sepia tone helped, with some images very eerie, looking like the B&W photo of my dad setting an IV up on a guy on a stretcher being carried by Marines. He was a Corpsman in on Guadalcanal, Guam, and Okinawa. That Okinawa photo was used on the front page of a NY paper.
I do not think he would have thought the battles that much over the top, nor the mental torment. But I do not think it would have been good for hime to watch it. My stepmom tells me he had nightmares into his 80's when he died. Would wake up and say that the Japs were after him.
Odd thing is, I served in VN from 67-69, and for whatever reason, we never talked about our experiences.
Read Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester. He fought with the 1st Marine Division from the landing at Guadalcanal until he was blown to shiite on Okinawa.
That was my main beef as well. Not enough character development. There is a fine balance between having too little, and too much. This one hit the too little mark.
The real Virginia Grey was prettier than the bimbo looking girl in the Bond Drive episode. Not sure if the real Star slept with the soldier or not, or if it was just creative writing. And the girls they hooked up with in Melbourne looked like they fell off Vanity Fair Magazine, and not like ordinary girls. Not complaining about that though.
Compared to “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” stunk up the joint.
Beware any production that features a narrative from the point of view of a WRITER. How lazy and self-referential is that? All the characters end up neurotic and undistinguishable from each other. Because that’s what hack writers are. A good writer can write through the eyes, ears, and experiences of someone, anyone else.
Until Hitler attacked the mother country, the hollywood reds were Hitler supporters.
Well, as far as treatment of American POWs was concerned one was far, far better off being a guest of the germans.
1 It was Boring.
2 Character Development was poor, I still don’t know who the hell was who, so it was hard to care who lived or died
3 The “Feel of the times” factor didn’t work. It wasn’t as bad a something like Black Sheep Squadron where all the WWII nurses all had Farah Fawcett hairdos but I just had a hard time believing these were vets of the WWII generation.
They had more baby boomerish mannerism.
4. Too crammed, Band of Brothers covered a little more than a year, this one covered 4 years and worse it had some episodes that were wasted a lot of time with irrelevant uninteresting subplots (i.e. The guy banging the Australian babe, the Sargent trying to get in the Italian cooks pants, etc).
Unfortunately there's a lot of that in Band of Brothers also. The whole last episode where the once heroic soldiers all turn into drunken, violent thieves and thugs that went around terrorizing the countryside. Plus the portrayals of Lieutenants Sobel and Dyke were just so over the top that it's just ridiculous.
WTF does that have to do with anything???? Boomers? Just maybe these were the fathers of the Boomer generation???
Oh wait, I recall your screen name being ID'd with some grunge generation ping list.....you are dismissed....irrelevant and ignored. Go suck on some shotgun suicide music.
I agree there were two episodes out of the 10 that could have been left out or shortened. - but removed those and it was not boring. The fighting scenes were as intense as anything I have ever seen in a war movie. More shocking that even Band of Brothers, and from books written about Guadalcanal, Peleliu, and Okinawa they did not stretch the truth.
I would agree some on your feel for the times comment. Its a very difficult thing to do to make the viewer feel you are taken back in time . There is a long list of movies that accomplished that well, and a longer list that didn't. But I'm not going to give the movie a thumbs down just because they missed that mark.
As far as it being too crammed. The sole purpose of the series was to show the viewers what one group of men went through during the war as they island hopped with the 1st Marines. Would you rather they have shown one battle, and then just before the credits have text explaining what happened the next two battles - who died, who got medals, who went on to civilian life after the war, etc?
My biggest complaints would be the lack of character development, and the two episodes that had a “modifier TV movie” feel about them. The production quality was not as good as Band of Brothers, or Saving Private Ryan, but it was still a nice addition to my war movie shelf.
Now my Dad if he could have seen it , would of said, “Where the hell is my ship?” And then gone on for an hour about how the Marines would not have gotten on Peleliu or Okinawa without his Navy, and his USS Mississippi's 14 inch guns.
“modifier TV movie” feel about them.
That should have said “made for TV movie” feel about them.
I think some people are just are obsessed with criticizing on a public forum the accuracy or content of historical war movies made in these times. They can easily find fault with movies like The Pacific, Band of Brothers, Thin Red Line, or Saving Private Ryan, but when you bump those movies up against the war movies we watched on Saturday afternoons back in the 60’s we have come a long way in making these movies more historically accurate and real to the viewer. None of these newer movies are perfect, and yes a couple were bad, like Pearl Harbor, which started out great, and then about half way through fell off a cliff. But still I would rather have these newer war movies on my DVD shelf, than to have Hollywood produce none at all.
Finished the series last night and here is my final thoughts. Out of a possible 5 stars I would give it a 3 and a half. Not nearly as well put together as Band of Brothers, but the battle scenes were excellently done, with historical accuracy a goal for the film makers.
I would have liked to see more of the Navy involvement. I know the story was about the 1st Marines, but they could have shown some of the action taking place to support those landings. 5000 sailors were killed off Okinawa, including on my Dad’s ship the U.S.S. Mississippi, which was struck by a Kamikaze and was damaged horribly. Unless you studied that battle or watched the extras, you would have thought the sailors had it easy. My Dad would have said, where the Hell is the Navy?
All of the battles, especially Okinawa could have been improved with a narrative before each explaining a little about the objective, what the Americans were up against, and afterward another narrative with the aftermath. Instead you had to go to the extras. We armature WWII historians maybe knew some about the battles, but I had to explain what was happening all the way through to my wife.
And finally the last episode was a total bore. It could have been done away with and then move the soldiers bios into the specials section.
The internal struggle Sledge had at the end was a total fabrication. While never minimalizing the horrors he experienced, he ended his autobiography with an expression of how this country is worth everything he went through.
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