The Pacific

[JRibeiro]

Um dos principais críticos de TV americanos já viu toda a série, The Pacific é um digno sucessor de Band of Brothers:

Midway through HBO’s 10-part World War II epic "The Pacific," a group of frightened Marines try to take their minds off of combat by talking about family vacations. One mentions that his father always said of the Grand Canyon, "You have to see it to understand." The family eventually went there, and, the private explains, "My dad was right. Pictures don’t show it. You have to be there, looking down into it."
Most viewers of "The Pacific" won’t have actually witnessed the brutal combat on small islands like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But the moving (in every sense of the word) pictures of the miniseries do an incredible job of making the viewer feel like they’re looking down into the real thing.
If anything, "The Pacific" is an even more intense, gutting experience than "Band of Brothers," the beloved 2001 HBO miniseries that focused on the European theater of WWII and came from the same production team, including Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and "Pacific" head writer Bruce McKenna.
War was hell in "Band," but not to this extent. The combat is savage, bloody and unrelenting, everything more shocking in both its scope and its intimacy. The soldiers in "Band" came to recognize they had much in common with their German counterparts; the American and Japanese combatants of "The Pacific" view each other as completely alien and terrifying.
The advances in digital effects over the last decade, plus a $250 million budget, lets "The Pacific" depict fighting in ways "Band" simply couldn’t. The most memorable "Band" moments often took place in between the action, but there are long stretches of "The Pacific" where there’s nothing but action. The fifth, sixth and seventh episodes essentially turn the battle of Peleliu (a footnote in many WWII histories) into three straight hours of the storming-the-beaches sequence from the start of "Saving Private Ryan."
But the carnage is never mindless or shown without purpose, and the altered focus of the new miniseries makes it easier to understand what’s happening as the bullets whiz by, mortars explode and bodies fall.
(Easier to a point, anyway; there are certainly sequences of the miniseries, particularly on Peleliu, where I gave up trying to chart who was where and just tried to pick my jaw up off the floor.)
"Band" followed an entire company, and even its biggest fans (and creators like Hanks) will admit it took nearly half the series before viewers could figure out who everybody was. Here, the focus is more varied but also simpler, with three central characters, all Marines: steely veteran John Basilone (Jon Seda), writer-turned-machine-gunner Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale) and son of privilege Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), who enlists in spite of a heart murmur because he’s desperate to prove himself a man.
The trio rarely interact with each other (though Leckie serves in a company with Sledge’s best friend), but the pattern of their service — with the men coming in and out of action at different times — allows the miniseries to cover a large chunk of the Pacific campaign while also not splitting your attention too much. At most, only two of the three are in combat at the same time, and several of the episodes focus on only one Marine. There are a few supporting characters of note — most memorably Rami Malek stealing a few late episodes as an amoral buddy of Sledge’s — but so long as you know who and where Basilone, Leckie and Sledge are, you’re fine.
This not only makes the action (somewhat) simpler to follow, but the portraits to grow deeper. There’s no performance quite on par with Damian Lewis’s star turn as the quiet, decent company leader in "Band," but the three leads all take advantage of their showcase roles to craft characters that transcend both war movie cliches and the actors’ own mixed backgrounds. Seda (Falsone from the later years of "Homicide"), like Lewis in "Band," finds a way to make his characters’ innate heroism and super-competence into something absorbing. Dale (Jack Bauer’s partner Chase in the third season of "24") completely owns the flashiest role of the three, as the angry, arrogant Leckie comes close to losing his mind a few times in the wet, oppressive jungles.
Mazzello (the little boy from "Jurassic Park") has perhaps the trickiest role, as Sledge most has to carry the miniseries’ key theme about what war (even a "good war" like this one) does to the men who fight it. Early on, Sledge’s doctor father warns Eugene that he doesn’t want him to come home like the boys he saw serve in World War I.
"Wasn’t that they had had their flesh torn," Dr. Sledge tells him. "It was that they had had their souls torn out."
Those are loaded words for an actor to have to embody, but Mazzello does it over the course of his "Pacific" tenure, and by the end, you may feel as weary and hollow as Sledge.
This isn’t the ripping adventure yarn "Band of Brothers" became at times. (And I say that as someone who reveres "Band" and rewatches it in its entirety every couple of years.) The experience of watching it is more visceral and relentless, but as rewarding in its own way. You’ll feel stirred at some of the heroism on display, but mainly you’ll be in awe that good men were able to endure the horrors on display and return home — some more intact than others.

[DaProfezzur]

QUERO!!!

[JRibeiro]

Not long after HBO’s "Band of Brothers" debuted in 2001, "Band" writer Bruce McKenna was sharing a beer with Bill Guarnere, one of the World War II veterans whose story was depicted in the landmark miniseries. McKenna told the former paratrooper that he couldn’t believe what Guarnere and his Easy Company mates went through as they made their way across Europe.
"Bill said, ‘You think we had it rough? You should talk to those boys who served in the Pacific,’" McKenna recalls.
That quote was at one point going to lead off "The Pacific," a "Band" companion miniseries nearly a decade in the making. And it remains the guiding principal followed by McKenna, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and the rest of the team behind the new $250 million production.
"This is ‘Band of Brothers’ goes to hell," says McKenna.
Where "Band" followed a single company of paratroopers from basic training through the end of the war, "The Pacific" is told from the point of view of three Marines, two of them from New Jersey: Raritan’s John Basilone (played by Jon Seda), Rutherford’s Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale) and Eugene Sledge from Mobile, Alabama (Joseph Mazzello).
"My mandate from Hanks and Spielberg was, ‘Do the entire war and do it intimate,’" says McKenna. "I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’"
But Leckie and Sledge had each kept combat diaries that were later turned into books (Leckie’s "A Helmet For My Pillow" and Sledge’s "With the Old Breed"), which provided the exact level of intimacy McKenna’s bosses asked for, and the three Marines’ time in and out of action helped bridge most of the island campaign in the Pacific, from Guadalcanal through Okinawa. In a stroke of providence, it even turned out that Sledge’s best friend, Sid Phillips (played by Ashton Holmes), served in the same company as Leckie.
McKenna didn’t have a single company to focus on like in "Band," but he also had only three main characters for viewers to worry about, and usually only one at a time. As he says, "I can remember having a meeting with Tom Hanks saying, ‘We’re not going to make the same mistake we made on "Band" where we didn’t know who anyone was until episode 4.’"
At the same time, Hanks acknowledges that this story doesn’t have the "graceful narrative" that they could take to the campaign in Europe, which he and Spielberg covered so well in "Band" and "Saving Private Ryan."
"The war in Europe liberated Paris," Hanks says. "They landed at Normandy, and eventually you crossed the Rhine into the fatherland, and Berlin fell. The war in the Pacific does not fall into that brand of territorial narrative. You tell me what’s important about Peleliu. Well, we establish what’s important about Peleliu, Guadalcanal, Okinawa — little tiny spots."
And in depicting what happened on little tiny spots like Peleliu, the miniseries goes to a far more savage, violent place than its predecessor.
"In Europe, an enemy soldier could throw up his hands; his war would be over," says Hanks. "The war in the Pacific was more like the wars we’ve seen ever since: a war of racism and terror, a war of absolute horrors, both on the battlefield and in the regular living conditions. The challenges that we put to ourselves at the beginning of all of this 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."
To do that, the project worked on a much larger scale than "Band." Where "Band" kept the combat of the Battle of the Bulge (Easy Company’s most famous fight) off-screen, "The Pacific" devotes three harrowing hours to the devastating battle to seize and then hold an airstrip on Peleliu that ultimately had no military value.
The scope and relentless devastation recalls the Omaha Beach scene from the opening of "Saving Private Ryan," though Spielberg was insistent that the new project not share the desaturated look that that film and "Band" shared.
"In the Pacific, because it was blue skies they weren’t fighting in overcast weather," says Spielberg. "Sometimes monsoons would come in and it was terribly rainy and muddy and you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face, but it was a blue sky war. It was a hot, dry, humid blue sky war. So there are more vivid colors in ‘The Pacific’ than we ever had in ‘Band of Brothers.’"
There’s also more time spent on the homefront, and on the long lulls between the fighting, and on the personal lives of the men. Two episodes feature no combat whatsoever, another spends a long time on one character’s nightmarish hospital stay, and romance is a more pressing concern than it ever was in "Band."
"War is not just combat," says McKenna. "War is the families at home, and the response to it, and the girlfriends who are terrified the lovers are going to die. It wasn’t done just because we felt, ‘Oh, let’s get the chicks in.’ These guys only spent 10 percent of the time fighting. A lot of the time they were bored out of their minds, fighting dysentery, or on leave in Melbourne trying to (have sex)."
The production numbered 800 crewmembers and more than 100 speaking roles, not to mention all the non-speaking extras on top of that.
"All the actors, whether they were the extras or the stars, took their moral responsibility to get this as right as possible very seriously," says McKenna. "They knew this was not just a job. That pervaded the entire production."
"It was on the forefront of our mind every day," says James Badge Dale, "and it’s a humbling experience to go through that, to try to portray another man who was there. And we lived through that for 10 months, and I just hope we can do them justice."
"I think the responsibility to make sure we got this right is what drove us," says Jon Seda, who was raised in Clifton. "I think there was a certain point in time for all of us where we realized how important this is. This isn’t just to make another show, just to make another film or a television show. This is to be the voice for so many men — the real heroes. And I think, especially for me — Basilone was raised in New Jersey, and I was raised in New Jersey, too. So I can’t show my face in New Jersey if we didn’t get this right."
McKenna has been working on "The Pacific" since 2003, and admits, "The first couple of years, I was oppressed, thinking, ‘My God, is this going to be better than "Band"?’ And finally I said, ‘I don’t care.’ This is not ‘Band of Brothers.’ There are some people who are going to like this a lot more, and some who will like it a lot less. But it’s a different animal, and it has a different theme.
"This is the most savage campaign in American military history," McKenna adds. "It’s a very very dark place to go. This is a darker series than ‘Band.’ It is grimmer. I don’t want to say ‘more accurate,’ but it has a different emphasis. The emphasis is really, really, ‘let’s get in close and see what this does to young men.’
"I think what moved us to tell these stories based on these veterans, was, in essence, to see what happens to the human soul throughout this particular engagement," says Spielberg. "And to see what happens to those individuals throughout the entire course of events, leading up to the dropping of the two atomic bombs, is something that was very, very hard for the actors and for the writers and for all of us to put on the screen. But we felt we had to try."

[DaProfezzur]

Se eu hipoteticamente usasse programas de torrents já cá teria a versão 720p com legendas para ver antes da estreia no axn.

[n0odles]

Se eu hipoteticamente usasse programas de torrents já cá teria a versão 720p com legendas para ver antes da estreia no axn.

sim...hipoteticamente.....

[Glorioso]

Se eu hipoteticamente usasse programas de torrents já cá teria a versão 720p com legendas para ver antes da estreia no axn.

sim...hipoteticamente.....

Legendas... onde?

EU tenho mas vou esperar por amanhã para ver no AXN.

[n0odles]

Se eu hipoteticamente usasse programas de torrents já cá teria a versão 720p com legendas para ver antes da estreia no axn.

sim...hipoteticamente.....

Legendas... onde?

EU tenho mas vou esperar por amanhã para ver no AXN.

e mais do genero....legendas para que?

[JRibeiro]

Já vi, excelente, está ao nível de Band of Brothers, a recriação da batalha de Guadalcanal está muito bem feita, ainda não dá para reconhecer a maioria das personagens, mas são menos do que na outra série, por isso mesmo não deve demorar muito para que saibamos quem é cada um.

[Nuno Guerreiro]

Mas com 48 horas de atraso? Nem as equipas de legendagem comunitárias conseguem trabalhar regularmente [/img]

Normalmente, pras series mais famosas, em menos de 24h consegue-se legendas em portugues...

[jimmy]

Toda a gente sabe que as legendas saem rapido e blablabla 720p mas a iniciativa do AXN é muito boa. Eu como vejo 90% das series por season , acaba por me interessar pouco mas não tenho necessidade de deitar abaixo.

Mas falando da HBO , este ano o lineup é bom e esperemos que as expectativas sejam cumpridas pois a tv americana já cheira mal de tanta trampa. Dois exemplos daquilo que podem vir a ser óptimas referencias televisivas

Treme do David Simon



Boardwalk Empire , no qual o piloto é realizado pelo Scorsese

[Weyoun]

Mas falando da HBO , este ano o lineup é bom e esperemos que as expectativas sejam cumpridas pois a tv americana já cheira mal de tanta trampa. Dois exemplos daquilo que podem vir a ser óptimas referencias televisivas

Treme do David Simon



Boardwalk Empire , no qual o piloto é realizado pelo Scorsese

2011 promete não ficar atrás de 2010 em termos de série de qualidade HBO, no próximo ano estreará "LucK", é um projecto que promete bastante, é uma série criada pelo Michael Mann e David Milch e terá no elenco o Dustin Hoffman e o Nick Nolte, outro projecto que promete é a adaptação de A Game Of Thrones, a HBO já encomendou uma temporada completa.

[JLC]

Quando o fim de semana passada vi na TV um episódio de Lost que já tinha visto no computador, fiquei com uma forte impressão que nao tinham passado o episódio completo.

Agora um colega de outro forum, que fez o mesmo com The Pacific também diz que faltam bocados do episódio.


Mais alguém reparou?

[cyberduck]

Vi o primeiro episódio no AXN e depois uns dias depois vi novamente uma versão em 720p.

Lembro-me quando vi no AXN reparar que não houve uma introdução com comentários de algumas pessoas que viveram a guerra, como no "Band of Brothers", tb n achei muito estranho como essas pessoas já tem que ter pelo menos 80 anos...

Não é o meu espanto quando revejo a versão que passou nos estates, com uma introdução histórica antes do genérico, com imagens reais da guerra e com voz off do Tom Hanks(pareceu-me). E ainda um comentário de um homem que foi soldado na guerra do pacífico.

Ainda vi uma cena "mais forte" de um soldado que foi decapitado, na versão sakada, que não me lembra ver no AXN.

Na cena final do episódio quando cantam parabéns a um dos soldados, parece-me que também foi censurado, no AXN, a parte final da música (o som só) "happy birthday to you... how fucked are you now?...". (isto não tenho bem a certeza como n tenho o episódio do AXN Gravado e já passou uns dias)

Por isto não vejo mais no AXN. Quero ver tudo na integra. Não é assim que "contraria a pirataria".

E hoje a noite já vou ver o episódio 2

[Tojal City]

A única coisa que foi cortada no AXN foi a introdução.
A cena onde os encontram o soldado decapitado e os Parabéns, estão lá, embora não tenham legendado.
É estúpido, mas não me preocupo, isto é mini para ter em BD mesmo e ver umas 50 vezes.

[cyberduck]

A Cena do soldado decapitado aparece na versão do AXN!?

Pode ser... mas só na versão sakada é que reparei o que é que os "Japas" colocaram na boca da cabeça decapitada...