Reviews: The Pacific

Reviews emerging on HBO’s miniseries The Pacific are complimentary about the visuals and staging, drawing rave reports from some, but questions from others about whether it is too grandiose.

The series is expected on Seven after Easter.

Hollywood Reporter said:
Having created “Band of Brothers,” the masterful 2001 miniseries that followed Easy Company from its training in Georgia through the D-Day invasion and until the end of the war, exec producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg decided to balance the equation with a mini set in the Pacific theater. The result is “The Pacific,” also 10 parts but in some ways as different in its approach to the material as the jungle warfare of the Pacific was from the more conventional fighting in Europe. Both miniseries are infused with raw, powerful stories of personal triumph and adversity, but “Pacific” feels more random and more contained. Each episode is so completely built on discrete incidents that a strong case can be made for calling this a limited series. But call it what you will, it is a gem of a production and would be a highlight of any TV season.

Newsweek said:
Far from such energizing topicality, The Pacific is nostalgic to its core. It was designed as a companion piece to Band of Brothers, the 2001 miniseries that followed Americans on the European front, and comes from the same starry producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. It’s certainly big (at 10 parts and a cost approaching $200 million, it’s HBO’s most expensive gamble ever) and well crafted. Following the Band of Brothers model, The Pacific tracks several likable, conveniently varied characters based on real men: a thoughtful future journalist, an eager-to-fight Jersey boy, a sensitive Southern kid. There is grandiose, heart-swelling music and gut-wrenching, war-is-hell close-ups of combat. It’s easy to be drawn into such high drama.

New Yorker said:
There are nighttime battle scenes that last as long as ten minutes in “The Pacific”—an attempt to give viewers some sense of the unrelenting, terrifying reality of it all. This artistic decision echoes the one that Spielberg made in showing us almost half an hour of the Normandy invasion at the beginning of “Saving Private Ryan.” But authenticity in a war movie doesn’t depend exclusively on the accumulation of gory detail; it also requires emotional and psychological realism. Here, when [edit] dies, the camera pulls up from the splayed body in an aerial shot, as if the angels were lifting him up to Heaven, while generically elegiac orchestral music plays, and then cuts to a shot of his widow with a sunset in the background, as the music comes to a sweetly sad resolution. The scene is a lie about death.

Variety said:
Shifting to the other theater of war from “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” 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.