I am – Hercules!!
A new $150-million HBO miniseries from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks (“Saving Private Ryan,” “Band of Brothers”), “The Pacific” should be required viewing for any young man or woman considering enlisting in the armed forces. With its depictions of violent death, dismemberment, malaria, dysentery, incontinence, maggoty corpses, jungle rot, enemy traps, night terrors, suicide, (literally) petty officers, post-traumatic stress and general madness, the series is half horror story. It also suggests the atom bomb couldn’t have been invented a minute too soon. The project follows three U.S. Marines – Eugene Sledge, Robert Leckie and John Basilone – who fought the Japanese during World War II. The ruggedly handsome Basilone became a war-effort poster boy after his tiny squad held off thousands of Japanese at Guadalcanal. Sledge and Leckie both wrote popular books about the war and Sledge’s childhood friend Sid Phillips coincidentally served in the same company as Leckie. I don’t know if Sledge and Leckie ever met in real life, but they share a great conversation about God and fate in episode five. (Leckie ends up leaving the Pacific theater just as Sledge is joining it, so the two were not destined to share a lot of screen time.) Joe Mazzello, preteen star of Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” has as an adult a distinctive face that makes it easy to pick him out when everbody’s in fatigues. The Latino visage of Jon Seda, an American actor of Puerto Rican descent playing the Italian-American Basilone here, helps Basilone stand out among the other American soliders. (Helpful to fans of NBC’s “Homicide”: Seda starred in 46 episodes of that series playing another Italian-American, detective Paul Falsone.) Leckie is played by curly-haired James Badge Dale. (His curls were shorn when he played the CTU agent who was putting the bone to Kim Bauer -- before daddy Jack Bauer cut off his hand in season three of “24.”) Dale does a memorable job as the star of the first half of the series, but he’s hobbled a bit by the fact that – when a helmet hides his distinctive mop of hair – he looks and sounds too much like the other TV-handsome actors in his squad. While the series is driven by lesser-known actors, it’s always fun when a familiar face pops up. The famous Lt. Col. “Chesty” Puller is played by William Sadler (“Die Hard 2,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Roswell,” “Wonderfalls,” “The Bourne Conspiracy,” “Eagle Eye”). Matt Craven, just one of the many “Boomtown” vets involved in “The Pacific,” plays a good-guy psychiatrist in hour four. “Wonderfalls” headliner Caroline Dhavernas pops in for the first and last episodes as Leckie’s hot but dismissive neighbor. “Fringe” lead Anna Torv arrives at the top of hour five all glammed up as movie star Virginia Grey. HBO sent over DVDs instead of Blu-rays, but from what I can tell the production values are spectacular. The many shots of the massive warships at sea are CGItastic. A caveat: While hour one has many fine and distinctive moments, and serves to set up a lot of storylines that will wend through the entire series, it is one of the enterprise’s lesser installments. You’re encouraged to stick with the series at least until hour three, in which we get to know Leckie better as he hooks up with a pretty Australian. Few series launched this season have earned better reviews: Entertainment Weekly says:

… has both grand scale and intimacy. It builds in intensity as the series proceeds. …

USA Today says:

… stands with Band of Brothers as the best war movie ever made for TV. … easily the most brutal depiction of battle ever shown on American TV, from the near-constant fear of death to the debilitating discomforts imposed by jungle warfare. It's so intense, one almost wishes it were repetitious so you could at least build up some tension immunity. But instead, every island, every battle, puts its own new twist on terror. …

The New York Times says:

… mesmerizing … For all its realism, “Band of Brothers” was veined with an almost romantic infatuation with just war and noble warriors. “The Pacific” is harder to watch and all the better for it.

The Los Angeles Times says:

… its forerunner's equal in emotive strength, weird poetry and technical bravura; it is also, if memory of the first series serves, an even more brutal and unnerving experience, appropriate to a war fought in tropical extremes against an enemy for whom surrender was not an option. … the series is less a narrative than a kind of tone poem, alternating moments of dark and light, quiet and loud, action and rest. …

The Chicago Tribune says:

… a few slow patches and awkward transitions don't notably detract … The series' most notable achievement is that, in depicting the battles of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Peleliu and Okinawa, the creators of "The Pacific" have come up with some of the most visceral, intense, affecting war footage ever committed to film. …

The Washington Post says:

… we are made to understand that war is indeed hell, but it is also a lot of hunh? In terms of comprehension, it looks at first to be a death march, 10 unrelenting episodes. … All but the most ardent fans of war movies and the Military Channel will initially feel lost, overwhelmed. But if you give "The Pacific" about three episodes to broaden its story (the miniseries disembarks at 2100 hrs Sunday), it becomes the sweeping, engagingly emotional stuff one would expect. … becomes a very good miniseries that fails to arrive at a coherent, artistic sensibility. There are simply too many people making (and starring in) this movie with too much duty in their hearts, trying to do right by Dad. …

The San Francisco Chronicle says:

… Beyond the fact that HBO's ambitious new miniseries, "The Pacific," is a superb, viscerally moving and harrowing depiction of World War II and a worthy complement to "Band of Brothers" (2001), it offers a resounding yes to a nagging question: Do we really need another movie about World War II? …

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says:

HBO's latest World War II epic, "The Pacific," arrives in the shadow of the network's much-admired 2001 WWII miniseries "Band of Brothers," and there will be inevitable comparisons. If you're a fan of nuanced, character-driven story-telling, there's no question "The Pacific" is the superior effort. …

The Newark Star Ledger says:

… Most viewers of "The Pacific" won’t have actually witnessed the brutal combat on small islands like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But the moving (in every sense of the word) pictures of the miniseries do an incredible job of making the viewer feel like they’re looking down into the real thing. … The advances in digital effects over the last decade, plus a $250 million budget, lets "The Pacific" depict fighting in ways "Band" simply couldn’t. The most memorable "Band" moments often took place in between the action, but there are long stretches of "The Pacific" where there’s nothing but action. The fifth, sixth and seventh episodes essentially turn the battle of Peleliu (a footnote in many WWII histories) into three straight hours of the storming-the-beaches sequence from the start of "Saving Private Ryan." …

The Boston Herald says:

… The first episode, taking place in the days following the attack at Pearl Harbor, is an admittedly rough introduction to what seems like a platoon of characters. Relax. The miniseries eventually settles its focus on three men. … just might be the TV event of the spring, if not the year. Dive in.

The Boston Globe says:

… Amid the expertly managed tension-and-release rhythm of the miniseries, as the Marines go from full-on rampage to rest and cigarette breaks, the characters do tend to get lost in the action. “Band of Brothers’’ had a similar problem, as did HBO’s more recent miniseries about the early days in Iraq, “Generation Kill.’’ The men in these miniseries wear short hair and uniforms, and none are played by known actors, so they all blur together. Which guy just got hit? Which one is frozen with fear? There’s something to be said for asking the viewer to feel this kind of chaos, to put us in the middle of the muddle of battle. War shouldn’t make too much sense. But once that point has been made in these epics, the interchangeability of the characters gets in the way of the storytelling power. It’s harder for us to invest emotionally in each character’s experience, since it’s not clear who’s doing what. We can be awed by the pyrotechnics, by the stunning shot of a severed hand on a battlefield wearing a wedding ring, and yet still feel distant from the personal dramas. …

The Hollywood Reporter says:

… a gem of a production and would be a highlight of any TV season. "Pacific," in its totality, conveys a sense of the combat experience that is as complete and realistic as any work of film could be. From the harrowing nighttime battles with a deadly but invisible enemy to the sheer misery of the punishing jungle climate to the macho posturing of the young American fighters, "Pacific" omits nothing. …

Variety says:

… at times seems weighted down by an obvious desire to trumpet its importance in all caps -- and suffers when compared not only with that 2001 HBO miniseries but with Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers"/"Letters From Iwo Jima," to which there are unavoidable parallels. With its gaudy pricetag and glittering auspices, this 10-parter almost demands to be admired in its broad strokes, but yields fitful satisfaction in its particulars. While powerful sequences emerge, they're simply spaced too liberally across this ambitious project's epic, blood-splattered canvas. …

9 p.m. Sunday. HBO. Follow Herc on Twitter!! Follow Evil Herc on Twitter!!

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