BoB is my number 1. Watched it several times in the last 15 yrs. But damn if THE PACIFIC hasn't grown on me. Way more brutal and just plain depressing. Great job on both series.

BoB was so much more enjoyable to me and the cast was better, particularly Damian Lewis. Every time I see Jon Seda I just think of him as Selena's goofy husband in the JLo movie. WWII movies set in the Pacific are always so dark and depressing too. The Pacific was still a good mini series but didn't come close to BoB IMO.

The Pacific has better battle scenes IMO, but the rest of the show is mediocre.

Ragoo said:

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Snafu

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Private.

Really well put.


The "Why We Fight" episode of BoB made me choke up once. The final episode of The Pacific chokes me up once (when the dad is standing outside the room in the middle of the night) and makes me almost full on lose it a separate time (the hunting scene). And that happens every time I've watched it.

They're both great....just different approaches.

I think people shy away from Pacific theatre shows and movies because it is tough to realize that war was fought in the most brutal way a war can be fought. It wasn't fought between two sophisticated armies following strategy as the European theater was. The Pacific has transitioned to my favorite of the two series over time. First time I watched it I thought it was disjointed and had a harder time knowing who was who. Once those parts were understood, the show became extraordinary to me.

"Every time I see Jon Seda I just think of him as Selena's goofy husband in the JLo movie."

Your first mistake was watching Selena...

Stive said:

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Really well put.


The "Why We Fight" episode of BoB made me choke up once. The final episode of The Pacific chokes me up once (when the dad is standing outside the room in the middle of the night) and makes me almost full on lose it a separate time (the hunting scene). And that happens every time I've watched it.

They're both great....just different approaches.

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This part hits me at home. I grew up hunting and around guns my entire life, but a few years ago had a situation while out on a run with my wife where we ran into a woman who attempted suicide with a shotgun as we ran by. Fast forward a year or two, I have major anxiety issues around guns now. Used to be something I truly enjoyed and basically have panic attacks around them now. Its incredibly hard to deal with since its something that was basically a lifestyle for my family and friends.

Omg

I basically grew up with a gun in my hand (pellet gun, graduating to a .22 and a 20 gauge), and quail hunting was our primary household father-son time. I can't imagine going through what Sledge went through, only to get back home and have one of the bonding things between him and his father become a new trigger for horrible memories and experiences. Topping it off with his father being "sad" at the beginning when his son's heart had healed enough for him to qualify for enlistment, only to realize what his son had lost by being over there.... Raw and brutal.


On a completely separate note, we took the family to Florida last week and stopped to stay the night in Mobile. When we woke up the next morning, we had a few hours to kill before we had to hit the road so we decided to drive down to Dauphin Island to drive around and then take the ferry across Mobile Bay. By accident, we ended up on Dr Sid Phillips Memorial highway which runs North/South on the west side of the bay. Made me think about the closing scenes of the Pacific when they're showing the real people's images and talking about their lives.

I rewatch Band of Brothers every year, it's my favorite movie, tv, miniseries, etc about WWII. I've read the book as well and it's outstanding too. I've only watched The Pacific once, but I've read With The Old Breed, which is one of two books The Pacific was based on.

Band of Brothers vs The Pacific is an apples to oranges comparison. The Pacific is a lot closer to Vietnam in terms of warfare and troop experience than it is to the war being fought in Europe during WWII. It doesn't lend itself well to film because of the nature of the battles. It wouldn't shock me if the PTSD suffered by troops in The Pacific was higher than their European counterparts if such research existed. There's a lot more optimism in Band of Brothers, the feeling of accomplishment as they advanced through battles. There's none of that in The Pacific. Spending endless nights in foxholes, the smell of rotting corpses and coconuts, getting cut up by coral, being unable to dig in, fighting an enemy that seemed unkillable and didn't abide by traditional tactics or fight in a way that valued their own lives. It's easy to romanticize the European front, far from it on the Pacific. When you were relieved from duty you just go back to a ship, which was no picnic either, just waiting to be redeployed right back where you came from seemingly in perpetuity.

I do not wish to have experienced either front personally, but if you loaded up one vs the other, The Pacific was a more brutal experience than Europe for the soldiers. Pretty tough to make them comparative experiences on film, because they weren't. I'd venture to say plenty of the soldiers from The Pacific would have gladly traded places for a spot in Europe.

But I do think The Pacific serves as an incredibly important counterpart to Band of Brothers. It illustrates what the futility of war looks like compared with what is more commonly seen as the glory on the other side of the world. It's less rewatchable due to the source material, which isn't something you would want to take in annually.

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I basically grew up with a gun in my hand (pellet gun, graduating to a .22 and a 20 gauge), and quail hunting was our primary household father-son time.

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Same here. My dad still doesn't quite understand what is going on, but he has tried to help. Definitely from the "rub some dirt on it and man up" generation. I think it really clicked to him when I returned the guns I owned to him to keep hold of. I legitimately couldn't have them in the house. Thankfully my parents are great people so when I go home, we just talk about ranching and farming and he won't go into hunting unless I bring it up.

Max Power said:

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I rewatch Band of Brothers every year, it's my favorite movie, tv, miniseries, etc about WWII. I've read the book as well and it's outstanding too. I've only watched The Pacific once, but I've read With The Old Breed, which is one of two books The Pacific was based on.

Band of Brothers vs The Pacific is an apples to oranges comparison. The Pacific is a lot closer to Vietnam in terms of warfare and troop experience than it is to the war being fought in Europe during WWII. It doesn't lend itself well to film because of the nature of the battles. It wouldn't shock me if the PTSD suffered by troops in The Pacific was higher than their European counterparts if such research existed. There's a lot more optimism in Band of Brothers, the feeling of accomplishment as they advanced through battles. There's none of that in The Pacific. Spending endless nights in foxholes, the smell of rotting corpses and coconuts, getting cut up by coral, being unable to dig in, fighting an enemy that seemed unkillable and didn't abide by traditional tactics or fight in a way that valued their own lives. It's easy to romanticize the European front, far from it on the Pacific. When you were relieved from duty you just go back to a ship, which was no picnic either, just waiting to be redeployed right back where you came from seemingly in perpetuity.

I do not wish to have experienced either front personally, but if you loaded up one vs the other, The Pacific was a more brutal experience than Europe for the soldiers. Pretty tough to make them comparative experiences on film, because they weren't. I'd venture to say plenty of the soldiers from The Pacific would have gladly traded places for a spot in Europe.

But I do think The Pacific serves as an incredibly important counterpart to Band of Brothers. It illustrates what the futility of war looks like compared with what is more commonly seen as the glory on the other side of the world. It's less rewatchable due to the source material, which isn't something you would want to take in annually.

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Anyone who wants to start arguing the merits of the two nukes at the end of the war need to watch and understand The Pacific campaigns and watch the series....especially as the islands got closer and close to mainland Japan, culminating in Okinawa. Multiply that campaign x100 and that's the invasion of Japan....minus any actual beaches to land on or close canal to cross to stage the landings. It would have been horrific.

I loved BoB upon watching it when it first aired. Great show. Having said that, when The Pacific aired about a decade later, I immediately liked it more than BoB. It was the focus on the individual characters, particularly Sledge, that really spoke to me.

I saw some of myself in Sledge (for much of my childhood and into junior high, I had a heart murmur that limited my athletic endeavors, and I was a scrawny one such as the actor portraying Sledge). The series spurred me to read With the Old Breed and Helmet For My Pillow, two of the books that were the source material. The depiction of combat was so much more visceral than anything in BoB, and while it was a disjointed series, it was easy enough to follow along with my previous knowledge of the overall Pacific theater of operations..

And like stive said above, I had a big emotional response at the end with the Dad outside Sledge's room and then again when Sledge just broke down while hunting.

My maternal grandfather was in The Pacific during WWII. He died when I was around 7 or 8 years old. It makes me sad I never got to talk to him about anything. My mom said he never talked about it growing up, it was just understood that he was there, and that was it. I just got the impression whatever he experienced, it wasn't good. As a kid none of that would have interested me, but as an adult I'm still fascinated by WWII above all other periods in history.

It makes me sad anytime another WWII vet passes. What a group of men, men that collectively stood up against tyranny, and defeated it. One day there won't be any of those men left in the world, what a shame that is to think of. I've been to the Pearl Harbor Memorial, and Arlington National Cemetery but I really want to go to France. It's on my bucket list. One of these days when my daughter is old enough to hopefully understand the gravity of those places I want to take her. I wasn't in the military, neither of my sets of grandparents wanted me to end up there, and both my grandfathers fought in different wars, my paternal grandfather fought in Korea. He was deathly afraid that when 9/11 happened there would be a draft, he didn't want his sons in Vietnam, and he didn't want me anywhere near a war. No idea what he saw, he didn't talk about war either.

I just finished rewatching BoB last week and have finished 7 of The Pacific episodes (my wife is watching The Pacific for the first time). I definitely feel like my appreciation for The Pacific has grown a lot since the last time I watched it...probably helps that I just finished reading Flyboys and was already in the mindset of that setting

The nature of the stories themselves just make Band of Brothers a more enjoyable watch. You get to follow one group of guys all the way, and they happened to be at a lot of very important battles.

The Pacific is very well done, and a great show. It is rewatchable, but not in the same way.

Clippy was 1000xs better than Bob.

Max Power said:

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I've been to the Pearl Harbor Memorial, and Arlington National Cemetery but I really want to go to France. It's on my bucket list. One of these days when my daughter is old enough to hopefully understand the gravity of those places I want to take her.

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If you ever do, Point-du-Hoc and the village Sainte-Mre-glise (where the paratrooper got hung up on the church steeple) are the must-sees. Out of all the sights, those are the places where you really get a feel for what the soldiers on both sides might have experienced. The shell craters on Point-du-Hoc are absolutely massive and I can't imagine what it was like being a german soldier having to endure that. And there are still bullet holes in the church in Sainte-Mre-glise.

What's funny when I look back on my tour today: the beaches were a disappointment. I remember driving up to Omaha Beach with the expectation that it would be a somber but powerful experience and that I would feel what I felt after watching Saving Private Ryan. Instead, it was just a regular old beach (with the exception of the bunkers) that was really crowded that day. It's hard to get a feel for one of the most iconic battles in American history when there are children laughing and having fun and topless women walking around.