Most of us have seen Band of Brothers. The groundbreaking HBO mini-series considered to be the greatest of all time, brought to us by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. We'll they are back.
A 10-part mini-series from the creators of "Band of Brothers" telling the intertwined stories of three Marines during America's battle with the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II.
IMDB page is here.
Supposedly its inspired by several different novels written by soldiers in the Pacific war, instead of just the one used to create BoB. I for one am pumped the fuck up. This couldn't be more up my alley.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e99B80crU3EHere is a super interesting interview with Steven Spielberg about making "The Pacific", and his war movies in general.
Snippets (spoilered for length):
Question: When you were making Saving Private Ryan, did you have a sense that you were establishing a visual template for war and war depictions that were going to be carried over for 12 years now?
Spielberg: In Saving Private Ryan, I had a sense that I was establishing a template, based on the experiences communicated to me by the veterans who fought that morning on Dog Green, Omaha Beach, and their experiences, and the very few surviving photographs of the great war correspondent, Robert Capa. I combined those photographs to try to find a 24-frame-per-second equivalent for how I can show that kind of terror and chaos without making a movie that looked elegant and beautiful and in full living color, very much like war movies had been made in the past.
It wasn’t that I was trying to break the mold of the old war movie approach, visually, but I was simply trying to validate all of this testimony that had been communicated to us, based on the young men that lived and survived that battle. I didn’t know it was going to establish a look for war movies, but it was certainly what I thought was right for that particular story.
Q: How much time did you spend working on this(The Pacific)?
A: I would say years. Longer than I actually remember. It was inevitable that we would do The Pacific with HBO because there was such an overwhelming response, not only from the general public that got very involved in Band of Brothers, but we got so much positive mail. At the same time, that mail said, “I was a veteran of the Solomons.” “I fought on Tarawa.” “I was at Midway.” We got so many letters of veterans from the Pacific Theater of Operations, asking us if we could acquit their stories the way we acquitted the stories of the European Theater of Operations.
Q:Are there more stories to tell?
Spielberg: There are many more stories to tell, and we’re going to tell them.
Are you developing them?
Spielberg: We are developing them.
Episode 1 is apparently titled "Guadalcanal".
Here are the books that the new series is based off of ( click the images to be taken to each Amazon page.)
With The Old Breed by Eugene Sledge
Summary:
]His memoir is a front-line account of infantry combat in the Pacific War. Sledge writes of the brutality displayed by American and Japanese soldiers during the battles, and of the hatred that both sides harbored for each other. In Sledge's words, "this was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands." Sledge describes one instance in which he and a comrade came across the mutilated bodies of three Marines, including one Marine whose genitals had been cut off and stuffed into the corpse's mouth. He also describes the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, including the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpses (and, in one case, a severely wounded but still living Japanese soldier), as well as other disturbing trophy-taking.
Sledge describes in detail the sheer physical struggle of living in a combat zone and the debilitating effects of constant fear, fatigue, and filth. "Fear and filth went hand in hand," he wrote. "It has always puzzled me that this important factor in our daily lives has received so little attention from historians and is often omitted from otherwise excellent personal memoirs by infantrymen." Marines had trouble staying dry, finding time to eat their rations, practicing basic field sanitation (it was impossible to dig latrines or catholes in the coral rock on Peleliu), and simply moving around on the pulverized coral of Peleliu and in the mud of Okinawa.
Helmet For My Pillow by Robert Leckie
Summary:
Beginning with boot camp in MCRD Parris Island, South Carolina, the story follows Leckie through basic training and then to New River, North Carolina where he is briefly stationed, and follows him to the Pacific.
Leckie is assigned to the 1st Marine Division and is deployed to Guadalcanal, northern Australia, New Guinea, Cape Gloucester, before being evacuated with wounds from the island of Peleliu. "Helmet for My Pillow" is told from an enlisted man's point of view; a contemporary book jacket stated the book was about "the booze, the brawling, the loving on 72-hour liberty, the courageous fighting and dying in combat as the U.S. Marines slugged it out, inch by inch, across the Pacific.
Red Blood Black Sand by Chuck Tatum
Summary:
There isn't one that I can find.
It all starts Sunday, March 14th. Cant. Fucking. Wait. In the meantime, here are some websites and stuff:
Main HBO website for the series.
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I absolutely adore BoB.
And also I know very little about the Pacific war, so it will be educational!
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
European theater > Pacific theater in my opinion, but it'll do!
I loved Band of Brothers oh so much, so I'm confident this will be fantastic.
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Me neither. I dropped it when I realized that I never used it. I'll bring it back when Game of Thrones comes out though.
Feel free to add me on whatever network, it's always more fun to play with people than alone
:O curb your enthusiasm!
Unfortunately, I do not think they will have an episode on the retaking of the Philippines, since I believe none of the three veterans the show focuses on participated in that particular combat action.
Still though, Saving Private Ryan and BoB were aces
I could swear Tom Hanks was one of the producers, but I can't be sure.
He is, but he doesn't play a role (as far as I can tell)
So kind of wishy washy about this
Also seriously Private Ryan was a fucking dickbag and holy shit that guy shouldn't of had a movie made about him
Thanks a lot for getting a whole fucking unit killed because you have some retarded ass sense of "honor", asshole
Fuck that shit pisses me off. So much
Err how did he get his unit killed because of honor? I watched this a whiille ago, don't remember much
Also wasn't Saving Private Ryan only loosely based on real events? My understanding is that there was no actual Pvt. Ryan; but there might have been some guy with a bunch of brothers who were killed.
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― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
After Private Ryan he teamed up with Spielberg as a Producer
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Captain Crazy, Saving Private Ryan was fictional. You're angry at some guy who never existed.
Bring on The Pacific.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
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This is a true statement. Damian Lewis is awesome. Haven't seen him in anything since Life though
I feel bad for the real Sobel, he gets raked over the coals in the series and even moreso in the book.
And almost certainly pick it up on Blu-Ray.
According to posts 4 and 7 at
http://forums.wildbillguarnere.com/index.php?showtopic=2115
recounting a 2002 reunion of Easy Co., Sobel's son said he was a good father.
There's a long stretch between "not a good battlefield commander" and "all-around silly goose."
Possibly another thing; HOllywood makes a big deal out of people being killed, BoB, and life, just does it, and I think that is much more effective, though it might just be the shock factor.
Yeah I wasn't a big fan of Saving Private Ryan, it seemed a bit silly to me, and the only entertainment value of it was things going boom.
The fact that Band of Brothers is heavily based on real events, and portrays them so damn accurately plays a huge role on how great it is. Because you're basically watching what has happened, whereas films like Saving Private Ryan is just a well made Hollywood fabrication.
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I hope this is as good.
As far as finding the depth in BoB better than SPR, well, of course. BoB had ten hours to expand and show each character, whereas Ryan had 2. If you want to blame any of Ryan's character shortcomings, blame the medium rather than the work.
Well
1 - it was not real people, fiction set in actual events
2- Private Ryan (Matt Damon) didn't get anyone killed. The pussy typist who convinced Tom Hanks to let the prisoner go is the cause. He let the Jewish dude get stabbed in the heart then the dude they let go shot a bunch of 101st dudes and Tom Hanks.
Lots of great stories are made up, I don't really see how a story being based on real events makes it better. Nearly every episode of Law & Order is based on real events.
The messages in SPR and in BoB are basically the same, Miller's squad are just as much "brothers" as Easy Co., and Gen. Marshall is even more disconnected from the realities of the battlefield than Col. Sink. SPR does a good job in communicating them in 1/5 the time BoB has.
I agree with this, I thought the characters were all fantastic. I just think they deserved to be in a better story.
It's not that I'm against fiction. I love fiction, fiction is great!
I guess it's just that when it comes to recounting real events, I like more realism and less Hollywood, but that's just me.
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Haha...every time I watch the intro to Band of Brothers I choke up a little bit. THE INTRO. Something about that music gets me. I've never felt so emotionally connected to characters in a TV show before.
Snippets (spoilered for length):
Red'ded for I just got a boner.
Click the link at the top for the full interview. It really is fascinating.
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I wrote 5 different papers on the Battle of Midway between 5th and 7th grades. Partially because I thought it was interesting and partially as a game to see how many different subjects I could fit it in.
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