‘The Pacific’ joins ‘Band of Brothers’ ranks

LOS ANGELES – Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg swapped other people’s war stories to groundbreaking, heartbreaking effect in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers.”

The unsparing and visceral depiction of battle in their World War II collaborations is revisited by “The Pacific,” a 10-part, $195 million miniseries debuting Sunday at 9 p.m. EST on HBO. Also intact is their celebration of the American veteran.

But “The Pacific” carves its own path across a lesser-known theatre of war with parallels to current conflicts. It also breaks the “Band of Brothers” mold by following its battered Marines home with a coda reminiscent of the classic World War II film, “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

The challenge “was to take human beings and put them through hell and wonder how in the world they would approach the world when they came back,” Hanks said.

“Part 10 is the first time we went for it,” he said.

The new HBO miniseries was born of its predecessor, 2001′s acclaimed, Emmy-winning “Band of Brothers,” which dramatized the true story of a company of paratroopers fighting in Europe.

“We only told a partial story in ‘Band,’” Spielberg said. “My own relatives were saying to me, ‘We all fought in the Pacific. That’s a different story. It was jungle warfare.’”

The filmmaker’s father, Arnold, battled the Japanese in Burma and an uncle flew B-29s over Japan. Other Pacific theatre veterans wrote to Spielberg, “wanting me to tell their story.”

The challenge for executive producers Hanks, Spielberg and Gary Goetzman was that the U.S.-Japanese conflict sprawled across a series of remote islands and lacked the European landmarks that gave “Band of Brothers” an instant familiarity.

The men of “The Pacific” fought for dirt on Guadalcanal, New Britain, Pavuvu, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. The miniseries opens shortly after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, follows the path of three young Marines and ends on the home front in 1946 after Japan’s surrender.

“You get to see who these men were before they come into the war, where they came from, why they wanted to get into it. … You get to see how they came out of it, if they did at all,” stated cast member Joe Mazzello. “You get the full scope of what it’s like to be an American Marine in that time.”

Mazzello, like his co-stars, plays a real member of the First Marine Division. The miniseries focuses on Eugene B. Sledge (Mazzello) and Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), both privates and authors of memoirs used in developing the miniseries, as well as Sgt. John Basilone (Jon Seda), awarded the Medal of Honor.

“The hardest part was portraying these men and trying to tell their stories truthfully,” stated Dale, a sentiment echoed by Mazzello and Seda during a joint interview.

Even as the producers vowed to go deep into the truth of the Pacific fight and whether U.S. troops emerged as heroic or not, producer Goetzman stated he eventually realized, “You just cannot help but have such an unabiding respect for these vets.”

According to Hanks, the Pacific theatre they faced was far different from the European one.

“The war in the Pacific was more like the wars we have seen ever since, a war of racism and terror, a war of absolute horrors, both on the battlefield and in the regular living conditions,” he said.

Besides the suffering faced by soldiers, there are scenes in the miniseries depicting Japan’s forced use of civilian islanders as unwilling suicide bombers. In one scene, a woman is blown up by a body bomb; her infant is in her hands.

“We want the viewing public to be prepared that there is a level of savagery in ‘The Pacific’ that is more intense than in ‘Band of Brothers,’” Spielberg said.

“Anything less than the graphic nature of that war, or for that matter any war, would have been met by scorn by the veterans who fought in it,” he said. “It would have just been one more Hollywoodized portrayal of an event that rends your body … and often doesn’t create even a memory of your existence. That’s war, that is what happens.”

Co-executive producer Bruce McKenna, a writer who started research for “The Pacific” shortly after working on “Band of Brothers,” stated the violence is historically accurate.

Okinawa was the site of the “most horrible battle that Americans fought in World War II,” he said. “There were 8 million artillery rounds fired, one every second.”

The estimated death toll, according to several historical accounts, included more than 100,000 Japanese troops, at least 75,000 Okinawans and more than 12,000 U.S. troops.

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Submited at Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 5:00 pm on TV News by admin
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