'The Pacific,'
war stories, brilliantly told
The new HBO series puts the viewer in the trenches
By Tom Conroy
Mar 12, 2010
They always say that war isn’t like it is in the movies. “The Pacific,” HBO’s new 10-hour miniseries about the battles fought by the U.S. Marines in World War II, isn’t like the typical war movie either.
An eye-opening, engrossing retelling of the stories of the men who fought in the islands of the Pacific, it provides as realistic a portrayal of what they experienced as could be imagined. HBO subscribers will get their money’s worth; everyone else should rent the DVDs as soon as possible.
But there are stretches when the series’ insistence on portraying the randomness, dehumanization and, yes, boredom of war works against the work as a whole. “The Pacific” succeeds as a series of brilliant episodes; as a long-form narration, it lacks cohesion.
Premiering this Sunday at 9 p.m., the series is based on two memoirs by former Marine privates: “Helmet for My Pillow,” by Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), and “With the Old Breed,” by Eugene B. Sledge (Joe Mazzello). It generally sticks to their experiences, except when it tells the story of Sgt. John Basilone (Jon Seda), who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on Guadalcanal.
The series is something of a sequel to HBO’s 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” which was also produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Like that series, it tries to show the big picture through the experience of a small group of soldiers.
Viewers who are led by the title “The Pacific” to expect a comprehensive retelling of the war against the Japanese will be disappointed. Many major events, from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, occur off-screen, as do the naval and air battles.
But the scenes of battle that we do see are terrifyingly realistic and often visually spectacular, living up to the standard set by Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” Viewers will feel as if they were crouching next to Sledge, Leckie and Basilone as shells explode and bullets fly by. Employing a cast of lesser-known actors helps add to the documentary quality.
That realism is problematic in one respect: Since nearly all of the Marines are young white men wearing uniforms and helmets and often fighting at night, it’s difficult to distinguish them. Conventional fictional screenwriting would give each of the important characters a nice expository scene, with maybe a flashback or two. As is, we sometimes learn the fate of someone we’re clearly supposed to care about before we’re quite sure which one he is. (This may also be because different screenwriters and directors worked on various episodes, a situation that also worked to the detriment of “Band of Brothers.”)
In the darkness and chaos of battle, Basilone’s individual heroics on Guadalcanal may slip past some viewers. His later actions on Iwo Jima, however, are simply inspiring.
Although one respects the filmmakers’ decision to give a full picture of the Marines’ lives between battles, a few judiciously chosen scenes probably could have sufficed. An entire episode is devoted to the Marines’ womanizing while stationed in Australia. Leckie nearly goes crazy from boredom and discomfort during a slow, rainy stretch. And as happened in real life, Basilone spends much time stateside appearing in War Bond drives and training new recruits
Leckie, who was injured before the war’s end, simply disappears for several episodes. This isn’t such a bad thing, because as portrayed in “The Pacific,” he’s ill-mannered, arrogant and self-centered, although irresistible to the ladies. When he’s about to ship out on his very accommodating Australian girlfriend, he acts as if he were the injured party. And the portrait of his parents is startlingly unforgiving. Out of respect for the real Leckie, who went on to become a successful newspaper reporter and author, one hopes that the actor and directors simply misread him.
Sledge, who becomes the focus of the action after Leckie’s injury, is far more likable and has a more satisfying story arc. Although Mazzello quickly exhausts his repertory of facial expressions in the endless series of reaction shots he’s forced to produce, we see a man slowly losing and then regaining his humanity.
Some scenes are quite brutal. Viewers see the Japanese the way the Marines saw them, as generally a faceless enemy, and one understands, if not excuses, some of the Americans’ excesses.
The Japanese side of the story is one of the many things the creators of “The Pacific” chose not to cover. That’s a minor criticism when they cover so many other things so extraordinarily well.
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