Cool News
HBO Greenlights Hanks/Spielberg’s WWII Miniseries THE PACIFIC!!
I am – Hercules!!
HBO has given the go-ahead to “The Pacific” (aka “The Pacific War”), the new World War II miniseries produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. The duo had previously collaborated on “Band of Brothers,” which focused on Easy Company paratroopers in the same war’s European theater.
Based on both "With The Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge and "Helmet For My Pillow" by Robert Leckie, the miniseries will follow two U.S. marines who fought and lived to write books about their experiences.
Read the report in Wednesday morning’s Variety here.
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bob ruled
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BAND OF BROTHERS is one of the very best war movies ever made. This is incredibly exciting news.
Yay, HBO! -
Band of Brothers is one of the best things ever so I am so glad we are getting this. The cost probably led to it taking so long to greenlight, but who cares, it is getting made, YAY!!!
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Can't wait to see this. A few years ago I had the honor of riding on a bus with a group of World War II veterans to Washington DC for the dedication of the national WWII memorial. It was an experience I'll never forget. One of the gentleman was a former Marine who survived Iwo Jima and the stories he told me defied belief. There were other Marines there who served in the Pacific and listening to their war stories almost made fighting the Nazis sound like a picnic in comparison. Now don't get me wrong - war is hell no matter where it is fought - but it seemed like there was some degree of "civility" or understanding of rules of combat in the European theater that was missing in the Pacific campaign. The stories of pure savagery are almost unbearable, and I am not a squeamish person in the least. Let's hope they do the same justice to this series that they did with Band of Brothers.
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If it's even half as good as BOB then it'll still be great. The Pacific Theater of WWII always seems to be over shadowed by war in Europe. I'm sure Speilberg and Hanks will maintain the quality we saw in BOB. Wonderful news...
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Can't wait. It was the characters that made that show , but I wonder if this will have a similar bleached out, hand- held look like band of brothers.
Or will it have a lush, rich coloured look like the under-appreciated Thin Red Line ? -
Tom Hanks presents: Bullets, babes, battleships, bikinis! Cast The Hoff as a General and add some musical numbers. Box office gold!
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As was pointed out, the Western European/North African war at least adhered to some of the old school rules, such as leaving medics alone and not expressing singling out officers for assassination. In the Pacific, it was non-stop chaos and destruction. One christmas I got my father two books: One was the war journal of Dick Winters from BoB, the other was a book written about Pelilu. Dick Winters spoke about not getting any decent sleep for days on end...the 1st Marines at Pelilu were engaged in non-stop brutal fighting for over a month on a spot of land smaller then the area fought over during the Battle of the Bulge. Pilots flying over Pelilu could actually smell the rotting corpses of thousands of dead. It was pretty nasty stuff over there.
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Band of Brothers was one of the last things my father and I got to watch together before he passed away. everytime I watch it, it brings back so many great memories and thoughtful discussions about how powerful that series was to each of us. I will be watching The Pacific no doubt!
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BoB is without a doubt one of televison's finest moments. Can't wait for this! Talkback overrun by WWII moral relativists in T minus 10... 9... 8... 7...
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Can't wait to see this series. That shiny BoB box set holds a primo spot in my collection. My cousin, who is a Iraq War vet and career military guy, LOVES that series more than anything else you have ever seen. My grandfather, however, a WWII vet and, more importantly, a D-Day vet, didn't think it was that great. Surprised the hell out of me, because I LOVE this mini-series. But he told me that the guys he was with acted nothing like the characters from the series. He still considers "Patton" the authoritative movie on WWII (Love Patton too, but there's too many war movies to decide which is the best).
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I liked the idea back when it was first mentioned some time ago. I consider Band of Brothers to be one of the best things ever shown on television.
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Apr 25, 2007 7:24:35 AM CDT
BoB is one of the best things that has ever been on tv
by milton waddams
And with the same core group to include Graham Yost, one of the single most unappreciated talents in hollywood, I eagerly await.
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Right, Michael Bay?
This is most excellent news. I'm sure you could have entire episodes in this series that would make the Omaha Beach Sequence in SPR look like the Bolshoi Ballet...Yikes. -
that this was going to be based on James Bradley's novel "Pacific." Anybody else heard that?
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Tx HBO for once again investing in great television.
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I watch it several times yearly, and it never fails to impact me. I don't like that it only focuses on two people; hopefully we'll have plenty of characters like BoB.
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Don't forget the mini series they did about the race to the moon
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first collaboration
1. moon miniseries
2. band of brothers
3. the pacific -
that "The Pacific" will focus on two Marines. So excited about this news I can't write too good.
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Apr 25, 2007 9:27:46 AM CDT
And Spielberg had nothing to do with "From the Earth...
by iamjack'suserid
..to the Moon". Goddamn stupid shortened subject lines! But that was a great mini as well.
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for the DVD. I don't have HBO. Sigh.
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Just ask any Jew. Or the folks living in Dresden. Or the untold millions of Russian civilians the Germans butchered in 1940-41. What was Grants quote. "Its good that war is so fuckin terrible lest we grow to fond of it." Or sumpin like that.
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Series ever. Andit will rule.
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...almost just as good as Band of Brothers and it will easily be the best thing ever produced about the war in the Pacific.
As for the concern about the series only focusing on two people; I'm thinking that'll only be in terms of episode narrative. We should get plenty more of the type of memorable casting we remember from Band of Brothers.
...atleast I *hope* so. I can't wait to see this. -
War needs to be uncivil, so we can win. Look at Vietnam and Iraq..we lost in 'Nam, and we're having all these problems in Iraq because we fight by "the rules" and the enemy doesn't. If we fought in Vietnam and Iraq the way we fought World War II, we still would never have lost a war. You can't fight with one hand tied behind your back.
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If Pacific is even half as good as Band of Brothers it'll be awesome. Don't hold your breath though; it's scheduled to be shown in 2009. Is this being co-financed between HBO and the BBC like Band of Brothers?
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... is SOOoooo played! I wish these damn aging boomer directors and actors would get over all the grief they caused their fathers when they were young and knock it off with all the "greatest generation" b.s! CHRIST... if I have to see another phoney-awe-filled WWII flick I'm gonna have an aneurism!
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Let WWII die. There've been 50,000 movies made of it. Enough already.
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Kid Z you're an ass! For those of us whose grandfathers fought on this side of the war, it's cool to see it recognized!
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Agreed. For those of us whose grandfathers fought in any part of WWII and taught us their love of their country; a high quality project on the subject is always welcome.
Watching Band of Brothers made it apparent to me that guys like the men of Easy Company are worthy of admiration. When there was a need for them to do something they went and did it, and did it well.
I'm looking forward to The Pacific miniseries with the hope that it will be just as insightful as Band of Brothers was. -
...go eat a turd sandwich and die already. Prick. Here's a suggestion...don't go see anything about WWII. Is there a circular purple bruise at your temple where someone held a gun to your pointy lil' head and made you watch WWII flicks?
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Since the US drop more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam/Cambodia than in Europe in WWII, how is that fighting with a hand tied behind ones back? Yeah, the rules of engagement were absurd (why arm a bird with a beyond visual range Sparrow when your limited to a visual acquisition ROE?)but we lost the propaganda war in Vietnam, not the shooting war. Or perhaps we shouldn't have been involved in that civil war to begin with either.
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it'll be the best thing on TV
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I fell in love with the show when it originally aired and finally got the box set for Christmas last year. I still love it, it never gets old. I can't wait for this!!!
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Read it back in college and found it to be exceptionally gripping. Easy to say now, but I always thought it would be a great movie. It's quite Full Metal Jacket-esque in that it follows a young man through boot camp into the horrific battlefields of the South Pacific. Some of the gruesome images Sledge described (like a GI slicing open a living Japanese soldier's cheeks to pry the gold teeh out of his jaw) stick with me to this day. With the talent and source material involved, I don't see any way this project can fail.
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Our enemies aren't stupid. They see we won't bomb a Mosque, they hide and store weapons in a mosque. They see we won't bomb cities wholesale (conventionally) like Dresden and Tokyo anymore, so they hide and fight in cities. They see we won't shoot women or children...guess who becomes the next generation of homicide bombers? It's already happening. It's what Col. Kurtz said in "Apocalypse Now".... "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared....And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."
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"They see we won't bomb a Mosque, they hide and store weapons in a mosque. They see we won't bomb cities wholesale (conventionally) like Dresden and Tokyo anymore, so they hide and fight in cities. They see we won't shoot women or children"
What do you think Blackwater is doing at this moment? -
WWII is constantly shown in countless movies because it was arguable the single most important event in human history. Sorry if you're bored by that, but you can't escape the war's impact. The creation of Israel, the holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the baby boom, the expansion of the suburbs, the Cold War, the United Nations... those are some of the things that happened during the war or came about in its aftermath.
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I started to lose interest when it first ran because I couldn't tell one person apart from the other.
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There has been a glut of WWII stuff out lately. I'm glad that Spielburg and Hanks are passionate about it, but there ARE other things they could put their energies into.
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This will probably be anticlimatic, but maybe they can still produce something good.
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This is sweet news. Bands of Brothers was great. It's a sweet idea to show both sides of the war for the US. Particularly since the Pacific war was by far more barbaric and intense than the Anglo-American vs. Nazi war.
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But, and I hope you agree, we're not on a total war footing like we were in WWII. However, we most certainly did bomb the living daylights out of Hanoi, especially in 1972. Dresden was completely unnecessary. Another comparison: Where's the civilian sacrifice in our current war? Do we have a nation-state we can claim as the enemy? No, it's a shadow war and should be dealt with by our unconventional forces. Little Army as opposed to Big Army (except in Afghanistan and even there we should stick to the Green Beret model that worked so well in 2002 ). And, no, we should never take the path you ascribe to Col. Kurtz nor do we have to. We're supposed to be the good guys, right? Torture, no matter the rational, simply does not give the intended results and only makes for more alQuida recruits. Creating more of your enemy isn't exactly a smart way to fight a war. I look forward to this series because it was a clear cut conflict with none of this terrorist shit. Fanatics, of course (see: kamikazies), but we knew exactly where they were and how to completely and utterly defeat them. None of these chicken-shit terrorist attacks (yes, I think today's suicide terrorist are cowards...especially compared to the kamikazes)to worry about.
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Even During Linebacker II, we couldn't carpet bomb to level the city as we did in Tokyo and Dresden. We couldn't bomb Haiphong Harbor because of Soviet Ships using it, they said, ships that were arming the enemy, but I digress. We partially mined it, but it was not drop the gloves no holds barred nothing off limits warfare that was WWII. I think Col. Kurtz was right only in that in order to win a war, you must be prepared to do whatever is necessary before you fire the first shot, and not be clouded by morality, or you've already lost. It doesn't matter how we got in Iraq. We're there, we're committed. Our mistake is that like Vietnam, we're fighting a war where we have rules of what we can and can not bomb, and the enemy does not. Now, I am certainly not saying that we should start lining up civilians and wasting them, but, if the enemy is in a Mosque, we destroy the mosque. If they're in a school, we destroy the school. That's how we won WWII. I do appreciate the civil discourse. I truly do. We're there, and we need to either get it under control or get the hell out. Make a decision one way or another, commit to it fully, and take our chances.
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We need good war films and let this fucking younger generation and Liberals know what REAL scarifice is.
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Some of My Faves In No particular order...We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Saving Private Ryan, BoB, Full Metal Jacket, Jarhead, Patton, GI Jane, In Harm's Way, Navy Seals (Yeah, I know), Flight Of The Intruder, Run Silent, Run Deep, Glory, The Fighting 69th, The Fighting Seabees, The Green Berets, Bat 21, The Longest Day, Paths Of Glory, Gardens Of Stone, Strategic Air Command...I could keep going. LOL
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Going to rule.
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I wasn't suggesting that the European theater was a cakewalk. Clearly it was no picnic either. The Nazis were some incredibly evil bastards and horrors and atrocities abound everywhere in war. It's a dirty business by its very nature. But I was referring in very general terms to the uniformed combat itself. I've spoken to many WWII vets from both theaters and the stories coming from the Pacific are almost always more unthinkable in their savagery. I remember one particular story about a group of new Marines fresh out of training landing on some island in the Pacific. Many of them had lingering doubts as to whether they would actually be able to pull the trigger and take a life when the time came. All doubts were erased when they saw some Japanese who were out of rifle shot range skin several prisoners alive and set another on fire to taunt and intimidate the Marines. Instantly their resolve hardened to kill every last Japanese soldier on the island. In their minds taking prisoners was no longer an option. Another Marine told me that the Japanese they encountered while island hopping had been abandoned for so long they ran out of rations and were eating their dead. Those are just a few examples that sprang to mind. The original point I was trying to make is that while war is awful no matter where it takes place, there are many horror stories unique to the Pacific theater that you don't necessarily hear about happening in the European theater. Maybe it's because in Europe they were near population centers whereas in the Pacific they were frequently in no man's land away from all traces of civilization. Who knows? Desperate times call for desperate measures. And for the record, I think the Holocaust is the single most evil act ever perpetrated by man. Anyway, I spent 6 years in the military and fortunately the closest I ever came to combat was a few sabre rattling exercises. If I had served during World War II, I can honestly say I wouldn't exactly have been thrilled about the prospect of serving in either theater.
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... from someone who calls himself "morGoth"! Shut up and go by some more eyeliner, kid!
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...haven't been called that in decades. That wasn't a threat, BTW, just a suggestion. A threat would read like: "I'm going to shove a turd sandwich down your throat and make you choke to death on it." See the difference? At any rate, why would you term someone a kid who was obviously pissed at your disparaging baby boomers? Wouldn't you conclude said person may BE a boomer? Tell ya what Kid (that IS your posting handle, yes?) you take back the boomer remark and I'll appy-polly-loggy for recommending you eat a fecal burrito and expiring as a result. Not that the freakin' Japaneese would've apologized for anything they did in WWII!! Oops...I digress.
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...you didn't care for either of Clint's latest offerings? Though I thought 'Letters From Iwo Jima' was the better of the two movies, it was a perfect bookend to 'Flags of Our Fathers'. Like 'Saving Pvt. Ryan' and BoB, I'm just happy that Hollywood is finally getting some of the technical aspects for war movies down...the authenticity I mean. I give high marks to 'We Were Soldiers...' too. Man, I about dropped one when I saw the two Navy Skyraiders coming in for that napalm airstrike. They even got the aircraft markings correct! I credit Speilberg for the authenticity as was evident in 'Empire of the Sun'. When Jim sits down in the cockpit of that crashed Zero (Steve even got the correct model, the A6M1 variant), every instrument, dial and switch was spot on. Thanks Steve, it means a lot to us geeks when you do the research! Yeah, I agree about the Hanoi bombings and it wasn't unrestricted like in WWII. Still, it drove the NV back to the bargaining table, yes? Now, I'm pretty sure we HAVE blasted a mosque or two in Iraq and didn't the recent deaths of nine servicemen happen in a school building they took over? The problem is that we are an occupation force and, just like the Brits in the 1920's, we're getting picked off in small groups. There aren't going to be any more pitched battles where we would call in massive tac-air and arty support on a scale that would kill a lot of civilians at one time. However, if there's ever a nuclear event in this country, I'm pretty sure we're going to see a response in kind. And thank'ee kindly also to you sir for your civil tone. I completely agree with your closing sentence.
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1970, eh? Are you then familiar with the exploits of Medal of Honor winner Mike Novosel during the Vietnam war? He was the most decorated Army aviation pilot ever and I highly recommend his book. If you read it, you'll see that he was also a Yellow Dog Democrat who definetly held many "liberal" beliefs. Since you made a rather absolute and blanket statement, doesn't Mr. Novosel's combat experience (two tours in Vietnam, Korea and WWII) rather negate your statement? I can supply many, many more examples of "liberal" combat veterans. My father, a Navy vet of WWII, was also a "liberal," for example. Heh, shake that eight ball and "Try Again Later."
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Saving Private Ryan sucked. But Band of Brothers was brilliant. I always attributed that to Hanks having more control over the latter. Spielberg is a hack, I hope he's just providing the money/clout. I'm sure this will be good, but I guess we'll have to wait for all the boomers to "retire" before we can move past this endless love affair with WWII. If this wasn't from the people who brought us Band of Brothers, I wouldn't even be considering it due to WWII fatigue.
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This'll be good and all but it's not going to keep me from dropping HBO after the Sopranos finishes. If they had taken that $180 and put it into another season of Carnivale, Deadwood or Rome, then I'd continue paying them $15/month. If they are just gonna sink it into a miniseries, then I'll download or Netflix it. It's a poor business decision, not that I won't appreciate it all the same.
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...that HBO is bracing for a mass exodus when The Sopranos is done?
Announcing this miniseries won't do much to stem that flow either. I wait for all of this stuff to hit DVD as it is. I've never seen Carnivale, but seeing more Rome and/or Deadwood would be interesting. Especially Deadwood which as I understand (still waiting for the June DVD release) ended it's third season with the characters and storylines entirely unsettled.
Hopefully HBO will have a few bucks left to put into producing the rumored Deadwood projects that are supposed to finish off the story.
All the same I'm looking forward to The Pacific. I hope they can come up with some casting that is equally memorable to Band of Brothers... which *may* be the best thing HBO has ever put together. -
The $180 million is in Australian dollars. That comes out to $150 million in U.S. dollars.
The future of HBO is going to be in doing these sort of big budget VFX heavy productions. Nobody else can do them, for the moment. HBO has optioned "A Song Of Ice And Fire" to turn into a series. With this move HBo is staying on the cutting edge of TV by giving home theatre viewers what they want, super high quality stories. All the indicators are pointing in this direction, that watching movies at home will be bigger than the theater within 10 years. Rome was the first big pilot project, and now they're going to create even bigger and better ongoing series. I cannot wait! -
...this ridiculous, uninformed, blanket statement renders irrelevant any opinion you could possibly have on anything from here on in... jesus, what an idiot.
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