In a great series, every word and frame is essential

Part 6 of "The Pacific" plays to the strength of the series - most of it consumed by a battle scene, a group of marines has to get across an airfield and take the high ground above a Japanese fortification on a desert Pacific Island. Absolutely terrifying. I'm amazed that anyone could do it - the fear, the suffering (they have basically no water, limited supplies). And as with the best of this up-and-down series, you're right in there from the Marine combat point of view - everything's chaos, we have no idea of an overall battle plan, must less the politics of the war or the tactics of the Pacific theater. This series spares no expense of photography, editing, sound, art direction - all those so-called second-tier award categories. With the Spielberg-Hanks-HBO team behind it, you know it will have first-rate-plus production values, and it definitely does. Just don't expect any narrative, and don't expect much in the way of character development or for that matter dialogue other than blam, splat. This episode includes the new recruit, Private Sledge, on his first combat mission, so it's a way for us to feel the fear of a novice, and also the guy who's emerged as a main character, Leckie, who's bashed up again but survives - tho we learn nothing further about his life. It opens with a scene at Sledge's Alabama plantation-like home, where his Marine buddy, home on leave, visits his parents and says he's not worried about Sledge - an obvious white lie. This incident, typically, adds nothing to our understanding of the characters and their world. Compare with truly great serieses like David Simon's The Wire or the one about Iraq whose name I now recall as Generation Kill - and you'll see that every word, every frame of those is essential, whereas too many moments in The Pacific feel peripheral.

You're right there with them as they storm into battle : The Pacific

"The Pacific" moves along in its episodic way - part 5 is really quite good in some ways though quite mediocre in others. The good, and this is the strength of the whole series: the ability to convey the feeling of the terrors of combat, how amazingly scary it is, especially for the guys heading in for the first time, making a shore into gunfire and air attacks. You're right there with them, it's terrifying - totally seen from the fighting Marine's point of view. If they know what's happening over at hq, we never see it or learn of it - on the ground it feels like chaos and the pure will to survive. It's a great tribute to the brave soldiers - not that this is the first film or series ever to take on this challenge, obviously (you immediately compare it with Saving Private Ryan among WWII films and and # of Vietnam films as well). The weakness: it really is an episodic series, with little or know attempt at character development or narrative arc. As noted before, it almost seems as if a different team of writers worked on each part and nobody oversaw the whole project. In episode 5, yes, Private Leckie is back on the scene, but just as we were maybe beginning to know something about him and care about him, he's off to the side and we focus now on a new recruit, whom we'd seen for a few bits in earlier parts. Meanwhile, we're halfway through the series and the hero of the first battle, John Baselone (sp?), is now stateside selling war bonds - a totally pointless subplot. Similarly, there was a long interlude on leave in Melbourne, but no attempt to weave that into the characters' lives going forward.

Maybe, just maybe The Pacific is coming into focus by Part 4

After I've beat up on "The Pacific" for a few days running, I have to say that Part 4 was a pretty good episode - this one looking, in the first half, at the horrible conditions fighting in a Pacific rain forest and the 2nd half at the strange life at a military psychiatric hospital. The series is doing a good job presenting different aspects of the war - not just one battle scene after another. We can see how sometimes the worst horrors are after the battle, slogging through mud, constantly wet and hungry. Mainly, I think, these episodes get better because at last one character is coming into focus - PFC Bob Leckie. We started off with 5 main characters, maybe 6 counting a guy stateside, and one by one they've peeled off and now we're staying with Leckie, or so it seems - just as well because the others, to me, are entirely indistinct. Leckie himself isn't the most compelling character I've ever seen - and the scripting is kind of odd, each episode so different that it feels almost as if there's no guiding hand for the series. The previous episode was all about Leckie's relation with an Australian woman who basically (and improbably) dumped him, and this episode has not a word about her. But it helps, with a canvas this vast, to have a focus, to have one set of eyes through which to see the kaleidoscope of war. Some powerful scenes in the hospital, and a good confrontation between Leckie and his superior officer who's a bully. The series never even touches on the politics behind the war, and that's probably just as well - it's all seen from the soldier's viewpoint, brutal and limited.

People do not behave this way - except in the mind of a screenwriter : The Pacific

Episode 3 of "The Pacific" takes place during a brief leave for the Marine battalion as they recover in Melbourne. At least I didn't blow out the windows with this episode - no battle scenes at all. The dialogue picks up a bit, no doubt thanks to the contributions of George Pelacanos, who co-scripted the episode, but this remains a series in desperate search for a narrative. The main characters are kinda coming into focus, but it still remains maddeningly difficult to tell them apart. One, John (something), who was heroic on Guadalcanal and won a medal of honor, is being sent home to try to sell war bonds. I guess that's possible, but how can that help this series - a hero we were just getting to know and like. Meanwhile, Bob Lackey, the one who likes poetry and seems to have left a girlfriends back home (he met her at morning mass and pledged to write), meets an Australian girl and follows her home, where her stereotypical Greek mama and baba bring him into the household - almost as if they're presenting him as a gift to their daughter. Do they even care that he's very likely never to come back to Melbourne? That if he does he's likely to bring their daughter home to the States? Then to compound the improbabilities she dumps him abruptly, claiming that if he didn't return it would break her mother's heart. Huh? People do not behave this way except in the mind of a desperate screenwriter. I give the series credit for its lavish attention to period detail and for having the courage to do an entire episode without a scene of combat, but the series has not found its footing and seems less likely to do so with every episode.

A series at war with itself - The Pacific

The weather's warmer, the windows are open, and I hope we're not freaking out the neighbors because we've been watching "The Pacific" and I have a pretty good speaker system and there aren't too many TV shows louder than this one. The Pacific seems to be about experiencing the war from the soldier's point of view - you're right in there among the incredible machine-gun attacks, the aerial bombardments, the grenades - you can almost smell the gunpowder. The house shakes. If that's what you want, The Pacific is all right. But is it really a good series? Two episodes in, I've yet to be won over and am having my doubts. The characters (we follow 5 guys as the enter the Marines, but we know almost nothing about their backgrounds and they're kind of hard to tell apart, at least in the early going) just don't come alive, the dialogue is simplistic, and the episodes seem to fall into a pattern: every time a couple of Marines are sitting around gabbing, get ready because an attack's coming! Moreover, we learn nothing about the geopolitical forces of the war (we are strictly held to the Marine's point of view), and though they occasionally talk about battle strategy - Col. Puller gives attack orders - there's no way you can follow the battlefield movements (first two episodes are about Guadalcanal). Again, the series is honest in its intentions - we're just like one of the Marines, mystified by the greater forces around us - but for that to work the characters have to be much stronger. Compare with the HBO series on the invasion of Iraq to see how this can work. And, ugh, the swelling soundtrack, Hanks and Spielberg sentimentality and trumped-up patriotism, totally breaks the mood of grim realism - the series is at war with itself.

The Pacific theater in WWII in 10 easy pieces

Did you think HBO's "The Pacific" would be a special about the ocean? No, it's a war saga of grand ambition - too grand, probably. This Hanks-Spielberg-Van Patten epic is meant to cover the entire Pacific theater of World War II in 10 episodes. Can it? From evidence of the first episode: Not likely. Episode one establishes, more or less, the main characters, all bound for the Marines and Guadalcanal, in such quick strokes that it's very hard to distinguish them from one another and, to the extent that we can, they're nothing more than "types": the wealthy Southerner, the guy leaving his girlfriend behind, the working-class Italian, et al. Will we see them grow and change through the trials of war? No doubt, but we see very little about who they were before the war - we're in Guadalcanal within 20 minutes I think. Once there, has there been a recent war movie that has done a worse job in depicting life in combat? These guys look like they're in summer camp, laughing, joking, tromping through the jungle. It's a shock when bullets fly, and even more so when we see the beach littered with dead (Japanese) soldiers. How did this battle happen? Did I miss it? Were any Americans killed? This episode is very awkwardly paced and by the end I know nothing about the battle and little about the characters. I see that the goal of this series is, apparently, to tell the whole story from the POV of the soldiers - nothing about the war rooms, the generals, the home front - but then we have to know them, care about them, and believe in them. For comparison, see the great HBO five-part series on the invasion of Iraq as seen from one platoon.

Two-plus hours of complete engagement - The Hurt Locker

Finally saw "The Hurt Locker," a surprising, still, choice for Best Picture, atypical of most winners and probably the beneficiary of backlast against the blockbuster frontrunner, Avatar. Hurt Locker is really good if not quite great. On the plus, it's absolutely 2+ hours of complete tension and engagement, without a sense of exploitation, gratuitous violence, or video-game extravagance. It feels totally real, genuine, as if you're in the boots of the men on the ground in Iraq, in this case a three-man team of bomb-disposal experts. One scene or episode after another entirely holds you, and you're thinking how can she (Katherine [?] Bigelow) keep this up? How can she maintain not just the pace - that's relatively easy - but the tension and intensity? She does - an amazing case of directing (and editing) in that none of the scenes (except a domestic scene near the end) is typical of most movies, dialogue, stills, etc. - they're all in action, in motion, on the job, and for this job a lot of the tension involves not chases and explosions but stillness and silence. Terrific movie, in that respect. If it has a flaw, it's that, by the time you're done, the story line is pretty simple, even simplistic. Yes, it's about three soldiers and how the war affects each of them in different ways, and we do get to know them, a little, by seeing them in action. But we don't know any of them deeply, they don't open up and aren't meant to do so, and we don't really see them change - they are fixed types at the outset of the movie and at the end, still. The main character, James, is enigmatic, sometimes a total bastard and then, in one scene in particular, quite solicitous - I didn't really understand these shifts and the movie doesn't plumb to his depths. It doesn't need to, really. It's a nearly great movie, and it can't be all things - if it wallowed too much in the psyche of each character, it would ruin the intensity and pace and be just another war (or antiwar) film.