the Pacific

Much more about the negative aspects of the war and how brutal the fighting there was.

The Pacific is really good, but you have to get out of the mindset of comparing it to BoB. If you compare it to that, it will pale in comparison. Judge it for what it is and you'll be satisfied. I liked Generation Kill but it falls into that same trap of being compared to BoB for whatever reason.

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This. It purposefully didn't let you into the characters like Band of Brothers. It was based off 3 not the entire company like BoB.

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It's also based off of 2 different autobiographies, so the story shifts focus/perspective about halfway through.

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But they couldn't really shoot the gruesomeness of what was said in the books it was based off of. Wait for the battle of Pelelieu and Okinawa.

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My father was a Marine, and was stationed in Okinawa between Korea and Vietnam. He talked about how isolated the island was, and the terrain. I can't wait to see how they show those battles.

Those young Marines had balls of steel. That airfield scene is one of the most intense things I have ever watched.

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My only complaint about The Pacific is their seems to be some filler episodes that just connect the dots.

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The Australia episode didn't need to happen.

Band of Brothers was GOAT (rivaled only by Lonesome Dove for me).

Pacific is not quite to that level. They tried to mesh 3 vastly different stories to make 1 coherent whole but the Pacific war did not really lend itself to that.

I've always said that they could maybe have tied the Leckie and Sledge stories together by making Sid Phillips the primary character. And they could have make a great stand alone movie out of the Basilone stuff. But they didn't go that route.

I do very highly recommend the excellent source books for the Leckie and Sledge stories:

Robert Leckie - Helmet for My Pillow
Eugene Sledge - With the Old Breed

Two books by two very different Marines but both well written and both great reads.

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Band of Brothers was GOAT

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Band of Brothers was the best thing that I have ever seen on TV. I remember watching it in my hotel room in Wales in December of '01. After September 11th, and traveling overseas...there was something about it that emotionally elicited so much from me. It was incredible.

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young Marines had balls of steel. That airfield scene is one of the most intense things I have ever watched.

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I've read a few books on Pelelieu, they really did run out of water within the first couple hours of the assault. That's how hot that shithole was.

In my mind it was the biggest waste of a battle in American military history. Didn't even use the airfield once.

Band of Brothers is on a level all its own. It is the Alpha and Omega.

Generation Kill is not on that level, but is underrated and was - relative to Band of Brothers - unheralded as well, so it never had much hype. For good or bad. No one built it up on a pedestal for us, so we are free to take it as it is. I liked Generation Kill a whole lot more than The Pacific.

The Pacific was hyped to the moon, directly sold as 'the Band of Brothers of the other theater', and then both by its own virtue falling short of Band of Brothers' total excellence, and because it was pitched as the second coming of that excellence, but wasn't, it received probably more criticism than it deserved; however, it does deserve some criticism. It's very uneven, lacks Band of Brothers' focus and flow because it is a splicing of like 3 different stories, and has a whole episode that is a totally unnecessary, boring waste.

It's not terrible, but put it this way: if The Pacific came first, they would never have made Band of Brothers, because The Pacific would essentially have been relegated to the same place in TV history as Generation Kills - loved by a cult following, generally well received, but not some transformative phenomenon - and nobody would be clamoring for another.

In some ways, The Pacific is a better version of True Detective Season 2. All the "magic" you loved about the first installment is absent, it's not tight, and you don't get into the characters. It's not terrible like True Detective Season 2, but the palpable absence of the greatness you experienced in Band of Brothers magnifies the faults of The Pacific beyond how actually just "meh" it is to the point that you want to angrily shout 'this sucks!' even though it doesn't really totally suck.