My Thoughts On HBO's The Pacific So Far...

Sunday night is a fantastic night of television. Between The Pacific, Breaking Bad, Celebrity Apprentice, and The Amazing Race I'm on overload Sunday nights. Well I'm catching up slowly and I just finished the 3rd and latest installment of HBO's 10-Part miniseries, The Pacific.

First let's preface this with a couple things. I was a HUGE fan of Band of Brothers. I loved everything about it, start to finish, and have seen it more than a few times. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg did an unbelievable job with it and I consider it the best miniseries ever made (although I'm also a huge fan of Into The West), and an epic on par with anything that has been done in the last 10 years of cinema, especially anything made for TV. So my expectations for this are very high as the Hanks and Spielberg again head this up, but with an even larger budget this time around (which doesn't really mean anything in regards to how good it will be). The second big thing I must mention is that I am a ridiculous history buff and World War II is one of my favorite topics. However, The fight in the Pacific with Japan just has never grabbed my interest as I have always been much more enthralled with the fight in Europe with Hitler and the Nazis. So coming in, I've had high expectations, but I don't expect it to be as good as Band of Brothers.

The Pacific has been very good so far, although I think it has taken a slightly different path than Band of Brothers in how they approached the start of the series, and that is one of my main issues that I will get to. The Pacific throws you right into the fight as the first and second episodes both revolve around the Battle of Guadalcanal. The fighting scenes are incredible even though the scenes at night can sometimes be hard to follow. They definitely took a different approach here in trying to get viewers in with fighting right off. This is where I think they made a mistake.

In Band of Brothers, there wasn't a lot of fighting in the first couple of episodes as most of it centered around boot-camp and deployment. The great thing about this though was that there was a ton of character development done and by the time the fighting ensued you were really involved with the characters and knew who they all were and their stories. I could honestly say that I didn't really know who anyone was for the first couple of episodes of the Pacific so it lessened my interest in the fighting a little bit. Instead of giving us solid character development early on, it seems they waited until episode 3 to give us the bulk of it. There was a lot of it done in the last one, and it definitely got me more involved with characters, especially Pvt. Leckie and Sgt. Basilone. I just wish they would have done this first so the fighting in Guadalcanal would have meant more.

That's pretty much my only issue with the series so far, and otherwise I'm loving it. I'm starting to get a better grip on some of the characters and I'm really looking forward to seeing where things go from here. You might need Wikipedia to help you follow some of what each character is actually doing for the first couple of episodes, but it's totally worth it. If you haven't checked The Pacific out yet you need to do so as it's only going to get better from here.