The Pacific - how does it compare to Band of Brothers?

Acting as a companion series to Band of Brothers – the evocative and enormously popular dramatic history about a company of paratroopers during the Second World War – was never going to be an easy mission. Yet that is what The Pacific, the latest collaboration between cinematic dynamo Steven Spielberg and Tom ‘the most likeable man on earth’ Hanks, aims to achieve. Does it succeed? Well, that depends on your definition of success.

As an educational project, The Pacific aims to plug a gap in contemporary historical imagination. When most Americans (and most Europeans, for that matter) think of the Second World War, they remember the battlefields of the continent, the hollow wreckage of shelled German cities and the Nazi death camps. Besides the few well-known events – Pearl Harbour, the retaking of the Philippines, Nagasaki and Hiroshima – the operations of the Pacific war don’t live in popular memory like D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Even then, few Americans knew about these islands on the other side of the ocean. “We were shipped to an island called Guadalcanal,” explains one veteran at the start of the first episode. “They even called it Guadalcanahr . . . they didn’t know how to spell the name.”

So, as history, The Pacific succeeds admirably. While Band of Brothers was based on Stephen Ambrose’s popular single-volume history, this new turn draws from a patchwork of memoirs and articles. Instead of an entire company of paratroopers, we’re now following the trials of just three marines – Basilone, Sledge, and Leckie. Moments from the marines’ pre-deployment lives are visited, followed by the landing on Guadalcanal, where the Japanese planned to build an airfield to choke off supplies to Australia. What seems at first like an overhyped walk in the jungle soon descends into a nightmare. The tension is well mounted by the Japanese taking their time revealing themselves – they’re like eerily silent, predatory monsters from an H.G. Wells novel. Skipping ahead to a night-time battle, enemy soldiers were literally running into each other in the dark, providing a sense of the unrelenting and nightmarish conditions that these men suffered.

Ultimately, however, that’s all we get. As a work of narrative drama, The Pacific is only adequate. So far it doesn’t demand any serious emotional investment in its protagonists beyond surrogate gratitude. You start to pine for the deprecating banter and group loyalty that was so present with the men of Easy Company. Single voices, however witty and authentic, can never be substituted for a well-complimented group harmony. It’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a closed conversation, replete with private jokes and remarks we only half understand. There’s a scene in Band of Brothers where a severely wounded soldier is lying in a basement, screaming through tears that he doesn’t want to die, while his friends can only look on helplessly. It’s absolutely horrible, but even more so because we know the soldier’s name and where he’s from, and likewise with his shocked friends. I don’t think The Pacific will meet that standard. It’s a painstaking record of the outward facts, but we’re left to guess too much about how the marines feel and how their characters are changing.

So there you have it – as a production, it’s superb. As history, it’s well-researched. As a three-dimensional journey, it’s somewhat lacking. Deep down, the producers know this, which is why it feels like they’re trying to compensate with generic orchestra music and a patriotic appeal to the enormity of the sacrifices these man made. For American viewers, this may be more than sufficient. For the rest of us, it can get tiring very quickly.

Catch The Pacific Mondays at 9pm on Sky Movies Premier

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