Uneven compared to BoB, especially at the beginning. Most of the first 3 eps can be skipped honestly, even the fights aren't shot very well.
But after ep5 it gets really strong, the battle scenes are incredible and probably the most realistic even now and it feels more authentic than BoB which glosses over the unromantic aspects of war. If they had a larger budget, and more eps to flesh out storylines, I honestly think this would be the superior series. They could've centered the starting episodes around Chesty Puller and reforming the Marines for WWII.
The Basilone episode is practically a movie in itself.
Might give it another try. In the early eps it seemed like they had problems with locations
I prefer it over BoB to be honest lads.
Its kinda problematic now, so we dropped it after the second episode
I saw The Pacific first and really liked it, but I'm having trouble making it through Band of Brothers. Feels like propaganda America frick yeah dogshit, despite a couple of hackneyed 'war is le hell' moments.
For me it's that Band of Brothers just feels like an action show first and a war show second. It's all about the epic moments and explosive battles and then when it comes to the human side of things it mostly falls on its face. Meanwhile, The Pacific is the exact opposite where it feels like it's more about the people and what a war is actually like, rather than just gun toting soldiers blowing shit up.
Yeah BoB makes war seem like it’s summer vacation with the lads. The Pacific portrays it as the hell on earth it is
I almost want to call it a meta commentary considering the difference in the fronts. When you were in Europe you always had England to go back too, and it was only a few hours away.
The Pacific was a nightmare, and the Eastern Front was even worse.
If they did a show set in Russia it would just be a dude with a thousand yard stare sitting in a pile of blood while sad slav music plays over the background for 12 hours.
And then he gets shot in the head and it cuts to black.
Eastern Front sequel of BoB/The Pacific would be so fricking kino. It's a shame that because of the war Russia has to be le bad guys right now.
There is no fricking way they could ever make a realistic Ostfront series. That level of savagery is just totally foreign to normie sensibilities. Just look at a fricking Katyusha barrage, it's absolutely terrifying.
Even the Stalingrad movie was kinda laughable to me and that was made by undramatic Germans.
A North Africa series (could lead into an Italian campaign) could be viable and fun, but then you have to deal with the question of Rommel
No questions, just be unapologetic about it. Rommel was awesome.
What's wrong with Rommel? Isn't he considered one of the 'good' Germans?
Generation War touched on the surface of that, with some kino building to building close quarters battles
>Russia has to be le bad guys right now.
Just put this scene and voila
?si=NpP55FRdWEj0poly
The funny thing is they shot the Bastogne scenes on a soundstage in summer, so not only were they not cold, they were sweating their balls off in all that fake snow. That's why you never see anybody's breath.
Plus E company was mostly in reserve during that time anyway.
It feels like Hanks and Spielberg took awhile to 'get' the war experience. They got basic shit wrong in SPR, like reversing "flash/thunder" and the real Winters hated their first edit of BoB because they put in scenes of him confused in the middle of battle scenes to create 'tension'. Towards the end of the Pacific, it feels like they finally hit that balance correctly.
Unfortunately, normies prefer the propaganda. And even The Pacific kinda shies away from really digging in to the horror, Iwo Jima and Okinawa are heavily truncated, not even full episodes.
Agreed. And I know people say that The Pacific is "boring" but to me the boring parts are some of the best parts. War wasn't always getting shot at and blown up. Sometimes soldiers spent time in allied cities relaxing but waiting in fear to return to battle, sometimes they were at nice hospitals where they didn't do much but lay around and some of them returned home to push propaganda. I like seeing that kind of stuff because you don't really see it in war movies/shows. Usually the "quiet" moments are
>SARGE LETS WALK TO THIS LOCATION AND DO THIS MISSION ALSO HERES MY BACKSTORY
I think the problem is the Melbourne vacation episode not only badly breaks up the pace, but doesn't even feel earned cause frankly, the way they portrayed Guadalcanal really doesn't seem that bad, not even close to the real situation. This is where the lack of extra episodes really hurt them, they didn't have any time to explain what Marines were, or deal with the progression of the war. Never even mentioned the reversal of the trend with Coral Sea and Midway.
That's why I think they should've made Puller a central character, he would've bridged the divide between training the recruits, explaining the campaign and still having tons of battle scenes.
10 eps to portray twice the time of BoB and far larger battles feels insulting in hindsight.
Chesty Puller would've been an amazing storyline, they even got Bill Sadler to play him. What could've been, sadly.
>we missed out on a chesty puller series
Now I'm sad.
i enjoyed it but that's exactly how i felt by the end lol
Yeah those basilione and australian episodes sucked, the rest was okay. Any scene with snafu was golden though.
Just finished The Pacific the other night, I think I preferred BoB tbqh. Sledge and Basilone were great but Lecky was kind of gay and BoB had much comfier “dudes rocking” energy. Pacific didn’t have anything that compared to the Winters and Nixon dynamic.
Also BoB had better [Spoiler]intro music.[/Spoiler]
reeeeeee
normie
It genuinely hurts when Ack Ack dies.
I thought The Pacific and BoB were great when I was like 13 but watching them now they feel like cartoons. Pure cheese. Entertaining but not very good.
I can see that with BoB but I've never seen anything portray battle so despairingly as the Pacific. What's your definition of very good?
Best episode of either show
The problem is you need an audience to sustain a production this big, and fundamentally no one really wants to know that war is just suffering and disaster. They all want the John Wayne heroics.
Not much longer until more Spielberg/Hanks produced WW2 kino
I am PUMPED for that shit. The HYPE is real.
It's hilarious that they probably won't get around to making an Army show, by far the largest force with the most theaters of battle in WWII.
>101st Airborne isn't the US Army
US Navy in the Pacific needs a series.
Problem is any Navy show would basically just be a CGI fest by necessity. See the recent Midway movie. Extremely expensive and unconvincing to boot. Unless they somehow went full Tora Tora Tora levels with practical effects, but even then they don't have the surplus equipment that existed back then.
Plus the background and sets are basically always the same. Tough to see how you could make something that long dramatically appealing.
>101st Airborne isn't the US Army
It isn't though. That's like saying the USAAF was US Army too. They were a highly specialized branch that was seconded to the Army.
They were a light infantry division fully integrated into the US Army command structure. What you’re saying is like claiming SEAL teams aren’t really part of the Navy
A show that follows a company that landed on Omaha up to Berlin instead of getting sent on a super secret mission to save one guy would be good. But then they would have to show how most guys who landed on the beaches had to wade through cold water and climb some ropes after walking across some sand with heavy gear while no one was even shooting at them. The D-Day landings always have to be shown from the first and second wave guys apparently.
I love the Sledge focused parts so much, he's a great character and I think his parts are better than anything in BoB
Honestly there's very little good WW2 media. Even "classic" movies are pretty shlocky compared to their contemporaries in other genres. My two favourites are The Great Escape and Bridge on the River Kwai, and it's probably no coincidence they're both prison escape stories rather than conventional "war" films. Das Boot is good too I guess.
bob: elite unit mows through fat conscripts on last months of war against an already defeated enemy
pacific: grunts have to fight suicidal zealots in absolute hell conditions
That's because the European theater was interesting, the Wehrmacht looked incredible, Europe actually mattered for economic and political affairs, and if you were an American it was the perfect war to fight in since it followed an incredible story arc of uncertain start with Normandy, high point with the liberation of France immediately followed by disappointment and set back with Operation Market Garden and the fall stall, then a dynamic last major battle with Hitler's final offensive where the allies heroically held out against everything the Germans could muster and beat them then spent a few months mopping up and having sex with German women and drinking champagne in comfy castles. All against a backdrop of interesting shit like spy games and super weapons and the looming threat of the Soviet Union as the sequel.
There was never any beat or rythmn to the Pacific campaign. After they got pushed out of the Phillipines the Pacific War was a bunch of boring naval battles and a bunch of marines landing on islands that all looked the same full of asiatics or darkies, blasting incompetent jap soldiers out of their bunkers, clearing the island and then going and landing on the next one to do the exact same thing. Most of the islands were absolutely pointless to invade and there was nothing interesting about the battles themselves. And at the end of it all it turned out that the entire Pacific campaign had been a pointless waste of time because there was no invasion of China or Japan, they just dropped two nukes and Japan surrendered. Literally every battle in that theater had been pointless.
The Pacific is a well made show but it can never be good because it's setting sucks major dick and the entire war there was worthless. Same reason why we don't get Iraq or Afghanistan kino.
My dude...they needed to get to Japan before they could nuke it. They couldnt just press a button and do it like they can now.
They could've invaded one of the closer islands at their leisure to create air bases. They already had total carrier dominance of the Pacific after Midway and that was in 1942. There was literally nothing the Japanese Navy could've done to contest any island invasion close to Japan. Every island that wasn't Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa was a complete wastr of time to take because those isolated garrisons had no means to affect US landings anywhere else in the Pacific and what little aircraft they had if they could even reach a US landing close to Japan would be eradicated in a single sortie and could never be replaced. The Americans strategic in the Pacific was stupid and pointless and the theater was always treated as a backwater to Europe because of its total irrelevance to the war. Everyone knew Japan was no real threat once their miniscule navy had been smashed which happened 3 years before the war ended.
you're typing this in 2023. I'm sure 1942 homies were scared shitless by zog propaganda saying the navy needed more gibbs or else there'd be pearl harbor 2
It was difficult to read your post at times because it was so crass. But it was - on the whole - correct. Unfortunately. This is a good summery of the romance and/or lack there of in WWII. It is why the global American hegemony and world narrative religion is focused on preventing another Hitler and ignoring east asia as well.
I've never watched The Pacific but everyone says it cuts to the women at home too often and that was always a turn off for me.
>but everyone says it cuts to the women at home too often
it literally never does this
>Most of the first 3 eps can be skipped honestly,
>first episode is the battle for guadalcanal
I've said it countless times and I'll say, the only people who dont like The Pacific are fricking moronic historylets who have no clue what the frick is going on/barely even knew there was a war against Japan
Yes it's terrible, I don't understand how people rated this. The acting was complete shit as well
it's good and the books it's based on are good
All the complaints about the Pacific theater are from literal mouth breathing morons, Vietnam got tons of kino. It's just a huge pain filming anything on oceans and islands.
That must've been my problem with it. Whenever I think about Pacific I don't think about Sledge or Snafu, Leckie or really anyone first. First I think about John Balogne and how boring I found any episode he was in. Not the greatest way to remember it but that's on me. I need to remind myself there's so much better stuff in this show besides that boring homosexual.
normies don't like it when you tell them fighting war is traumatic
normies are moronic. death to normies.
>normies are moronic. death to normies.
is that what tnd means?
It's too mature for the rah rah crowd. You know, the armchair generals who cheer for war like sunday night football.
I remember reading back when the show first came out that in real life he just got blown the frick up by a mortar
the sledge part is great. sledge was the kid in jurassic park that got blasted off the electric fence