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HBO's The Pacific: What Fresh Hell

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HBO's The Pacific: What Fresh HellHBO's The Pacific: What Fresh HellIf you watched the ten brutal episodes of HBO's Band of Brothers--in which war was not glorious but miserable,decorative fruitsand death sudden and ignominious--you were probably not thinking that there was an even uglier side to World War II that this miniseries was not showing you. But there was,Grow lights, #xand showing that side is the project of The Pacific, the ten-episode bookend that in nearly every way improves on its 2001 European-theater predecessor.

The war against Japan was different from the war against Hitler militarily, topographically and psychologically. WWII in Europe was, for all its mechanized death and horror, in some ways a throwback: it was the last great (so far) land war in Europe, fought in places with recognizable names by great massed armies. The men fighting there may have not known the big picture or cared about the geopolitics, but they at least recognized the war.

(As did we. For whatever reason, the movies have had more success with war-in-Europe stories than with war-in-the-Pacific stories like Letters from Iwo Jima and The Thin Red Line. Even WWII videogames, like Call of Duty, involve Nazi-fighting more often than Pacific-war scenarios.)

In the other theater, The Pacific makes painfully clear in its early episodes, the Marines that it follows had no idea what they were getting into. On the one hand, the war was simple: Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, and now we were going to get those bastards back. On the other hand,decorative fruitsthey were going to be introduced to a kind of war they had scarcely imagined, on islands they didn't know, at a cost they could not conceive. #x"I might have jumped into Normandy, but at least I got some liberties in London and Paris," a Europe vet tells a Marine after the war. "You got nothing but jungle rot and malaria."

The Pacific's Marines are not naive: they know they're going off to face a fierce enemy. But they go into the war in December 1941 talking about being home by next Christmas. Some expect a "cakewalk." No one can pronounce "Guadalcanal." We can, and the reason we know it is how horrible it—and Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and Peleliu—became for them.

If Band of Brothers' soldiers were fighting the last kind of war, in many ways The Pacific's are going to fight the next one. They land on their first beach in a flotilla of armored ships, and we, like them, are dreading the kind of D-Day firefight we saw in Band, and before that in Saving Private Ryan. They land: quiet. For the moment.

Instead of tank columns and shelled European cities, they find oppressive heat,#x disease and an enemy using guerilla tactics, suicide missions and sometimes civilians.decorative fruitsThere are poisoned wells and bugs in the rice ("Think of it as meat"). It's part Vietnam, part Iraq, part horror movie. (In some of the most tense scenes of waiting, in the jungle, in the dark, it is--and I don't mean this to be glib--like the sense of menace in a scene from Lost.)相关的主题文章：

HBO's The Pacific: What Fresh Hell

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