‘Every man has a breaking point…’
How do you follow the greatest TV show ever made? The simple answer is: you don’t. You can’t. While The Pacific isn’t a straight sequel to Band of Brothers – it features a whole new cast of characters in a completely different location – it was still produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, it was released on HBO and many of the writers and directors of Band of Brothers returned also. And so, they made the only decision that made any sense – to come up with something completely different.
The Pacific tells the story of the United States Marine Corps’ actions in the Pacific Theatre of Operations within the wider Pacific War. While we do have a sprawling cast of characters, The Pacific primarily focuses on three men: PFC. Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), Cpl. Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello) and GySgt. John Basilone (Jon Seda). This is the first big difference between this show and Band of Brothers. While the latter flitted between a rotating cast of central characters before finally settling on Nixon and Winters, The Pacific stays with the aforementioned three characters throughout with only minor deviations. This laser focus allows us to spend some time away from the war and in the family homes of the three primary characters which helps us to understand what makes these men tick. This is particularly true in the case of Sledge – the most compelling character – as we need to understand where he has come from in order to gain a sense of the place that he reaches come the show’s conclusion. Mazzello (previously primarily known for playing the little boy in Jurassic Park) plays the character beautifully from wide-eyed naivety in the opening episodes to grizzled cynic by the end. In fact, unlike with Dick Winters in Band of Brothers, everyone in The Pacific becomes disillusioned by war at some point or another. Perhaps because the conflict in the pacific is less well defined. There is no ‘Why We Fight’ episode here.
As the most expensive TV show ever made at the time of its release in March 2010, The Pacific looked and still looks incredible. In Wilfred Owen’s heart wrenching poem ‘Exposure’, he writes about how much the men come to hate the biting cold in the trenches – the implication being that the weather is more of an enemy to them than their rival combatants. While Band of Brothers tentatively explored this during the run of episodes that take place in Bastogne, in The Pacific, the harsh weather conditions are a constant feature of every day life, whether it be the stifling heat or monsoon rain. It really drives home just hellish life must have been for the soldiers who spent weeks and sometimes months deployed in and around the various islands off the coast of the Japanese mainland.
The Pacific is not as good as Band of Brothers – there is no doubt whatsoever about that. But then again, it’s not trying to be. The result is another incredible visual document of real soldiers facing real warfare – a fitting tribute to another group of heroes.