The Pacific
Band of Brothers is one of the best miniseries ever made. It tells the fascinating story of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division from D-Day through the end of World War II. The Pacific is a companion piece to Band of Brothers, following various soldiers through their experience fighting the Japanese following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Band of Brothers succeeds on many levels. The production looks incredible and does a fantastic job of putting the viewer in Europe in 1944. The cast is also very strong, featuring several standout performances. Despite requiring the viewer to follow many story lines, Band of Brothers is very well paced and keeps you involved in the story.
The Pacific, unfortunately, does not live up to its predecessor mainly due to its disjointed structure. Warfare in the pacific theater of WWII occurred on dozens of islands over thousands of miles featuring many different military units. This fact limited the filmmakers' storytelling since it wasn't possible to follow one group of troops from beginning to end as they did in Band of Brothers. Their solution for this was to select three different soldiers and inter-cut between their stories throughout the miniseries. In theory this method should work just fine; in practice, however, it serves to break up the flow of each episode to point of making it hard to follow. Band of Brothers solved this problem by focusing on one soldier per episode. Sometimes this was one of the main cast members and other times it was a completely new character. In each case it served to present that episode from a different perspective and show the main cast in a different light. In The Pacific this technique is used only occasionally and those episodes are easily the strongest of the series.
The lack of continuity of character development in many cases detracts from the experience, but in the end The Pacific is definitely worth watching. It features some fantastic battle sequences as well as compelling interviews with surviving veterans. If you are looking for a definitive pacific theater experience, however, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is far superior.
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