Thursday, June 3, 2010

Entirely Subjective Reviews: The Pacific



Like my grandma watching a Waynes Brothers movie, I can't tell anyone apart.

The Pacific is a beautifully shot TV show which tries to explode our heroic myths about war and I cannot understand it at all even though I tried really hard.

There's one big problem: I can't tell the characters apart. I know there's supposed to be an Italian dude and a southern dude, but after that--the characters are just all the same. Lots of men. Sitting around. And they are dirty and they eat food. And then there are explosions! IMPORTANT EXPLOSIONS! And then there are dead bodies and we feel bad because we know about the horror of war. But then there are explosions again! Whee! And we are in the past so we know that things are DIFFERENT.

I tried really hard to like The Pacific. I read episode guides to try to figure out which characters were which. But after about forty minutes through the second episode squinting trying to figure out whether there were two curly haired dudes or one and who the guy was who won the medal of honor and why he won it I put The Pacific on pause and went to do something else--and my life was not a single smidgen worse.

Metacritic Rating: 87
IMDB: 8.5/10
Amazon: 4/5

1 comment:

John said...

Agreed. Although I sat through the entire series. It wasn't nearly as explosive or engaging as Band of Brothers. The script tried to build upon that previous HBO series, while being more unpredictable and loose.

There was far too much focus on characters that were never cemented or built up. The only memorable one was the guy in the picture, but the fact I can't name him attests to the state of the series.