Quick 'N Dirty Review: The Pacific

Before we start, here's a quick look at the rating system that we use here at The Dirtywhirl:

100-95 - Classic Show; (In best Bill O'Reilly voice) "WE'LL DO IT LIVE!!"
94-85 - Upper Echelon Show; You Should DVR This And Watch It The Same Night
84-75 - Very, Very Good; You Should Make An Effort To Watch This Within A Few Days Of Airing
74-65 - Not Bad At All; Let These Shows Pile Up On Your DVR But Watch 'Em Eventually
64-55 - Fold The Laundry While You Watch These
54-0 - Don't Waste Your Time; You're Smarter Than This (Probably) 

Now... onto the review:

The Pacific

As a broke college working a barely above minimum wage job, I didn't have the luxury of affording HBO back in 2001 when Band Of Brothers first aired. The years have passed and the acclaimed miniseries has become a cultural touchstone (that now sits forlornly in my home begging to be watched for the first time) for war aficionados and television fanatics alike. When HBO announced that Band Of Brothers' production team of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg would be delivering a follow-up miniseries to the pay cabler, this time focusing on the oft-overlooked war in the Pacific during WWII, I began to steel myself to get in on the ground floor. I wasn't going to miss out this time. With many critics declaring The Pacific to be the best series that would air in 2010 before the first installment even premiered and with nine years passing since the airing of Band Of Brothers, expectations grew to an astronomical level. It would be all but impossible for anything to live up to that hype, right? So, does The Pacific meet those lofty expectations?

The answer is an unqualified, "Yes." Go to your local video store (if there's even one left - big ups to Netflix) and your eye is bound to catch one or two or 437 movies that deal with war. The subject matter is one of Hollywood's favorite standbys. In order to break out from the morass, a project like The Pacific needs to possess something unique to differentiate it from similar films/series. What The Pacific does better than any military project I've ever seen is convey, without a shadow of a doubt, the toll that war takes not only on a man's body, but more profoundly the toll that it takes on his soul. Saving Private Ryan, Generation Kill, et al are very effective in accomplishing their goals but I've never seen the type of pain, seen the type of drain on soldiers like what's shown in The Pacific.

In "Part One," bodies float through the waters of Guadalcanal after the first staged battle and the weight of what these soldiers have entered into becomes strikingly apparent. Later, in "Part Two" as they forage for supplies and food, they seem somehow less than human, almost animalistic in a way. When we see them in battle with the Japanese, we experience for ourselves the sense of terror and dread that they themselves must feel as the enemy charges towards them with bad intentions (and kudos to "Part Two's" director, David Nutter, for choosing to shoot this battle in a POV fashion, which adds to the fright factor exponentially). The war is robbing their spirit and there isn't anything that they can do about it. The visuals are shockingly powerful.

Another effective choice made by the series was the decision to focus on less characters than its predecessor. One of the main criticisms of Band Of Brothers was that the narrative was difficult to follow since there were so many characters for the viewer to track. The Pacific has largely learned from that misstep as the series focuses on three soldiers: PFC Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale, 24), a writer with a sense of duty to country; Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone (Jon Seda, Homicide: Life On The Street), a career soldier (and soon to be Marine legend) from a large family; and Corporal Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazello, Jurassic Park), a young man with a chip on his shoulder due to a medical issue (and parents) that initially keep him out of the service. Of the three, Dale could have the best chance at a breakout as not only does Leckie receive the majority of the screen time through the first half of the series, but Dale's performance of a man slowly breaking down in the face of unimaginable horrors is very impressive.

And break down these men do. When Corporal Sledge's father, a doctor, points out to Sledge that, "The worst thing about treating these combat boys from the Great War wasn't that they'd had their flesh torn. It was that they'd had their souls torn out," it's an explicit statement of what we're seeing (and have yet to see) play out on screen. We witness it yet again when Sledge's unit finally arrives for battle in "Part Five." They stand in stark, stark contrast to Leckie's battle-tested and battle-scarred platoon, which itself was fresh-faced and wide-eyed in its own right in "Part One." 

The series also makes the smart decision to humanize the Japanese instead of demonizing them (at least from the producers' point of view; the soldiers... that's another story). It adds to the weight of war to see that the enemy is very similar to you - doing what they feel they need to in service of country. At the same time, Hanks and Spielberg exclusively tell the story from the American point of view (unlike, say, Clint Eastwood's dual visions in Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) but to its credit it never feels jingoistic. Visually, since this is an HBO project with titans like Hanks and Spielberg guiding it, the production values are unsurprisingly off the charts. It's been reported that the budget for The Pacific came in at upwards of $140 million but every single dollar shows. It's breathtaking to watch.

Not everything about The Pacific is perfect. As powerful as it is, the series does seem like it will play better on DVD when it's possible to watch chunks at a time instead of the single hour that's parceled out over a 10-week span on HBO. There are also times when it's hard to shake the feeling that The Pacific is something important that's supposed to be watched as opposed to just being watched for art/entertainment's sake. It's almost like it's your duty as an American to see it, but at the same time it never feels like a chore. Will The Pacific end up being the best series to air this year, as it was touted? Maybe not, but it will definitely be the most moving and affecting series of 2010.  Does that make it "the best"? I'll let you decide that for yourself but I, for one, am happy to have been able to afford HBO this time around.

Dirty Rating: 88/100