Hacker Cinema
The Pacific
2010 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Bruce C. McKenna
Track the intertwined real-life stories of three U.S. Marines – Robert Leckie, John Basilone, and Eugene Sledge – across the vast canvas of the Pacific Theater during World War II. A companion piece to the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers.
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12 comments on Hacker News
Agreed, it's not just about the Eastern Front. The Chinese Theater is possibly just as interesting and full of stories worth telling.
I'm not sure the Pacific War gets that much less attention. There are plenty of American-made games set in it (Call of Duty, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2, etc) and shows, most noticeably "The Pacific", and movies (e.g. "Letters from Iwo Jima"). This is the theater where the only atomic bombs were ever used in anger, so there's also that making it famous.
Not from D-Day or the European theater, but “With the Old Breed” is a really well done personal account of combat in the Pacific. It was part of the source material for Ken Burns’ “The War” and for the “The Pacific” miniseries on HBO.
I think Fussel had a point in 1989, but after that there's been plenty of depictions of war that have been less sanitized. "The Pacific" comes to mind in TV, and "Fury" in movies, even if it's very formulaic.
Memoirs can be raw too:
- https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Helmet-For-My-Pillow.html
- https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/With-the-Old-Breed.html
And even before 1989 novels like Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy problematized WW2.
Let me formulate it like this: The most expensive series so far was The Pacific, with a budget of $22 million per episode [0]. You'd expect a high budget series to spend a lot on actors and directors - let's just go with 50%. This would put this series on a budget equivalent of $800 million to $1 billion with a "normal" cast (depending on how much you calculate as budget for lesser known actors). Given 20 episodes [1], this comes down to an equivalent of $40-50 million per episode. Even extremely high production value series like GoT were well below this number. Just going with the actual number of $23.25 million per episode already makes this one of the most expensive series of all time.
Now, this doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be bad, but having a lesser experienced cast burn through that much money smells like bad management and could therefore be an indicator that the series is highly over-produced with not much content to go with it. Of course, time will tell, but the lack of known-good talent in the management and the insane amount of money spent don't make me overly optimistic.
[0] https://stacker.com/stories/3159/25-most-expensive-tv-series-all-time
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/568297/lord-of-the-rings-season-1-episode-count/
I don't know. 465 million seems still steep for 8 episodes TV show. I am all for it cause Disney has seemingly skimped on their CG budget for their newer shows. So more competition means more TV shows will have film quality production.
But it is a concern, if their show costs more than something like Avengers: Endgame which had some of the biggest actors in Hollywood involved in addition to the probably insane VFX budget.
Obviously COVID would have affected the budget for the show, but I have a feeling that it went way over budget than was initially intended.
Although I agree with the marquee concept. HBO had their own marquee show: Game of Thrones, though it produced a lot of quality stuff like the Pacific, Band of Brothers, Sopranos etc that can be watched for years to come. Game of Thrones on the other hand was a big disappointment for the fans and its negative reception probably made HBO wonder what they would do after it was over (hence the Targaryen origin show and the Jon Snow series are being developed... personally I'm skipping both)
There's a lot of revisionist history out there.
The Emperor singled-out the atomic bombs in his surrender message. Japan was depending on the USSR to mediate a conditional surrender, until they entered the war, which closed that avenue. And the reason the USSR hastily entered the war was because of the atomic bomb, they knew it was about to end. Japan was no doubt very concerned about a second front in the war, but I don't know of any particular fear of the USSR... Japan had soundly defeated a pre-USSR Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.
It's quite possible that they would have endured the USSR joining the war effort, if not for the additional "shock" of the atomic bombs, and Truman's bluff that the US would be dropping one every week...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#transcript
Most of the Apple TV+ shows announced so far have TV-MA ratings [1]. They're also making the follow-up miniseries to Band of Brothers and The Pacific which will undoubtedly be violent [2].
[1] https://tv.apple.com/
[2] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/apple-launches-house-studio-band-brothers-pacific-follow-up-1246746
Eh, I'm not sure Band of Brothers holds up as well as you might think. It's really strong in episodes 2 through 6, where the core characters are all together from Normandy to Market Garden to Bastogne. But after that those core characters disperse, either by getting promoted or becoming casualties, and then from there the series just kind of fizzles out; for better or worse, in those early episodes Winters is the de facto protagonist, and once he departs the show never really manages to find another one.
The later sequel The Pacific suffered from the same problem of not having a stable, interesting point-of-view character for the audience to attach themselves to, only unlike Band which starts with one and then discards him The Pacific lacks one throughout.
Yep, that's all you true. I loved Band of Brothers and The Pacific. These days we watch a lot of old movies on films truck/criterion collection and mubi which sometimes even partners with festivals to bring their movies to steaming. I do miss going to the cinema more often though, especially during summer days that are too hot to do anything outside.
For more details on exactly why the USMC is so afraid of being without carrier support, see accounts of the Battle of Guadalcanal. I recommend "Helmet For My Pillow" by Robert Leckie, which was also one of the books used as a basis for the HBO miniseries "The Pacific".
They surely had the right to release the video; however, the manner in which they did it will lead many to question the credibility Wikileaks once enjoyed.
Until watching The Pacific mini-series (currently on HBO), I did not fully appreciate the saying "war is hell". Having never experienced war, I can't fully vouch for the show's authenticity, but if it's even close, you've gotta feel for any human being put in these circumstances.
TV is a bad example. Premium channels have a ton of money from their subscriptions, so they have a ton of money to invest into new programming. Take HBO for example, the Band of Brothers 10 episode series cost $125 million to make. The Pacific miniseries, has a budget of $250 million. Regular channels simply don't have the $$$ to match up. So while HBO has truly epic shows, regular channels are stuck doing cop shows, since they are cheap to make.
News on the other hand is static. The paid services aren't going to report better news. They aren't going to report more news. Nothing will change in how they are run, its just a way for them to start charging for content that is free elsewhere.