The Pacific - The Complete Series (Tin Box Edition) [DVD] [2010]

Heaps of praise have followed the series. I thought at first, prior to viewing, that it might be exaggerated. It is not. I should have known better, as the Beatles once said in song. The HBO reputation for high-quality productions is not illusory. These days the company is better than many Hollywood studios. They have raised the standards and stakes of American television. They are serious, a kind of American ITV or BBC.The series is exemplary, its purposes made clear from the outset, from the splendid, dignified opening credits. The score, written by Hans Zimmer, is simple and noble, a steady repetition of melody mainly carried by horns. The artwork montage is beautiful, close-up shots of charcoal breaking up and splintering on matte paper (mirroring what will later be rocket mortar blasts on beaches) as the outlines and lines of soldiers’ faces are drawn, all of them dirty, none of them smiling. These paper images dissolve into the real thing on celluloid, the soldierly subjects coming to life, moving up the beaches and into the jungle. Here we’ve arrived in paradise, a place of sunshine, surf, palms and birdsong. Yet this paradise is deceptive. It is deadly, strangers coming to it to kill or die, the iron in human blood returned to the soil.The historical build-up to the war in the Pacific is taken as read, not presented. There is no invasion and occupation of Manchuria in China, no Rape of Nanking. But the world is aware of Japan’s aggressive behaviour and knows it is champing at the bit for further conquest afield. It cannot be satisfied with Korea (annexed by Japan in 1910) and with controlling a part of China. It is ambitious and wants the whole of the western Pacific for itself, including Australia and New Zealand. It thinks itself deserving of a vast empire. It is seen by others as a menace because it was.Much of the U.S. Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii is sunk on the morning of 7 December 1941. On the same day airfields in the Philippines are seized. Within weeks the Philippines are occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army and the British are driven from Malaya and Singapore. New Guinea is attacked, as are many smaller islands throughout the western Pacific to be used as staging grounds for Japanese sorties throughout the Pacific. Among them are the islands of Guadalcanal and Pavuvu in the Solomon Islands (due east from New Guinea) and New Britain northeast of New Guinea (in the Bismarck Archipelago). As the war progresses north in the Pacific, the Japanese are in retreat, incrementally pushed back toward their homeland. The tiny volcanic atoll of Peleliu (south of Palau in Micronesia) is taken by the marines, at great cost of life on both sides, the objective being to secure the island to build an airfield to prepare for the retaking of the Philippines by the Americans. In the event, the airfield was never built, as General MacArthur was able to reinvade by sea after the decisive naval Battle of Leyte Gulf (Oct. 1944) by Allied forces (the U.S. and Australia).Later, as the war progresses even farther north, the key islands of Iwo Jima in the Volcano Islands (due south from Japan) and Okinawa (south of the main island of Kyushu in western Japan) are secured (again, with tremendous loss of life on both sides).The action we see in the series takes place on these aforementioned islands, as well as Stateside in various places with soldiers on home leave or in places of training and in Melbourne, Australia, where the U.S. Marine 1st Division goes for some weeks of R&R after their victory at Guadalcanal (America’s first in the western Pacific). In Melbourne the Yanks are greeted as heroes, the saviours of Australia, as many of the Anzac troops are off fighting in North Africa. Guadalcanal would prove to be decisive in this early stage of the war (Aug. 1942-Feb. 1943), because it gave the Americans Henderson Field and drove the Japanese off the island to their stronghold at Rabaul in New Britain (where their main naval and air bases were located in the western Pacific).The cast in the series is immense because the war was immense. But everything is pared down to three main protagonists, all with the 1st Marines, though each of them in different battalions (so we follow their stories separately). They are:• Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone• Private First Class Robert Leckie• Corporal Eugene SledgeBasilone was highly decorated for courage under fire both on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, receiving the U.S. Medal of Honor, the highest award given a soldier for personal acts of valour above and beyond the call of duty. He was also awarded the Navy Cross and Purple Heart for wounds sustained in combat. For a time he was a national hero in the States and sold war bonds for the government after the Guadalcanal campaign. But he was no pencil pusher and ran out of patience with war fame on the home front, allowing the limelight to dim for himself. He longed to be back with his comrades, back in action in the Pacific. He re-upped and returned to the 1st Marines where he fought again with them on Iwo Jima.Leckie, often called Lucky by his mates, somehow survived the madness of it all: the heat, humidity, rains, mud, blood, bullets, grenades, hunger, thirst, mosquitoes, sand crabs, lice, leeches, disease, fatigue and fear. He became a great writer of popular histories after the war, his masterpiece being “Delivered from Evil” (1987), an elegantly written, one-thousand page comprehensive history of the Second World War that I bought in a used bookstore in San Francisco for five dollars. I recommend it to anyone who appreciates the way in which beautifully descriptive passages can emerge from the chrysalis of carefully crafted prose. In this series we follow Leckie on Guadalcanal, in Melbourne (where he falls for a local beauty of Greek descent and spends time with her family), on Pavuvu, Banika, New Britain (at Cape Gloucester) and Peleliu, where he is badly wounded by mortar blast and billeted back to the States in November 1944.The journey of Eugene Sledge is quite improbable in its way. We meet him first as a shy teenager in Mobile, Alabama. His older brother has enlisted in the Army and will live long enough to fight in Europe and survive. Of course Eugene doesn’t know of such an outcome now. He just looks up to his brother and wants to do his bit too. But he’s unable to because of a heart murmur, rejected from active service time and again when he tries to enlist in the marines. But finally he is taken and the heart holds up, even during combat. He’s young and naïve, only 18 or 19, provincial, fresh-faced. He can barely grow a beard, coughs when he tries his first cigarette, is thin and lithe and doesn’t appear strong. But he ships out and is sent to New Britain, seeing his first combat at Cape Gloucester on the southern end of the island. Naturally, in the heat of battle he grows up quickly. The Allied victory there for the Americans and Australians (April 1944) means the Japanese will soon be in full retreat. We see him in action again on Peleliu (Nov. 1944) and on Okinawa (June 1945), by which time he’s a hardened veteran who smokes a pipe and mows down Japanese as if taking target practice at a fun fair, his humanity drained from him — or nearly. In two fine scenes we see him hesitate to shoot a civilian teenager who has had no part in the conflict and watch him encounter a Japanese woman dying in the rain in a thatched mountain hut whose roof has been destroyed by mortar fire. In great pain and agony she looks up at him, clutching her bleeding and messy abdomen. He points his machine gun at her face, stares at her, hesitates. She reaches up, pulls the barrel of the gun toward her, her eyes pleading with him to shoot. He nearly does, though this time out of compassion, not hatred, fear and anger. But he changes his mind, sets the gun down, kneels down beside her, places her head on his chest, strokes her wet hair gently, tenderly. She murmurs; he says nothing. She dies in his arms, tears brimming in his eyes. It’s all too much, all of this — this madness, killing, suffering, futility. If there is a higher purpose to it, he cannot fathom and feel it now. It seems he is reaching breaking point.There can be no quick and easy summary or outline of this beautiful and brilliant series. HBO spent over 250 million dollars on the production and it shows, becoming the most expensive television series ever made in the U.S. I cannot speak highly enough of it.At the end of the day, what can we say of the Japanese and their will to power? A lot, of course, but I will condense my thoughts here now.They were ruthless, ferocious, fanatical. They fought as though death didn’t matter, or was a minor matter compared to duty, honour and sacrifice, as if they were more valuable and valiant in death as heroes, patriots and martyrs than in life as defeated and captured warriors forced to surrender. The bushido samurai code made them one-dimensional, unthinking, unimaginative, like warrior ants sent out in swarms to protect the colony from invasion. They died in waves because they were taught to charge banzai style. Their superior fighting spirit would protect them, they were told and thought. But it did not. This was folklore, superstition, propaganda. They were physical instruments of the state and military, not spiritual beings. They were materiel to the military, part of the inventory of weapons. Those who fell would be replaced. This is true of all soldiers in war, but the U.S. marines had dog tags and names which were just as important, if not more important, than rank. For the Japanese the chain of command was everything, and at the top sat the Emperor himself, the most useful military symbol of all. So it wasn’t just that two different types of armies and modes of warfare met on the battlefields of the Pacific. Two opposed political world views did as well. An American would never die for an emperor or king. His country was founded in protest against absolutism. He could not allow himself to bow to any monarch. But a Japanese would fight and die for nothing less. Of course he loved his family and friends more than his emperor. But as a divine ideal the Emperor symbolised an imagined sacred cause that kept him going and fighting.On New Britain after a night-time banzai charge a U.S. marine remarks in amazement:“There were 100 of them in that charge. One hundred to our 1,200. They volunteered for that charge, even knowing our strength. Either they’re incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.”Or a third possibility — incredibly brainwashed. Japan, violent instigator of the Pacific War, connived that its warriors were victims of foreign aggression with no choice left but to protect the homeland. This was partly true. The homeland needed protecting. But a bully turns coward when he hides behind the protective screen of victimhood. It may not be true that Nagasaki needed to be destroyed. This can be debated forever. But Hiroshima did. The Japanese were already defeated prior to August 6. The Japanese High Command knew it. But they and the Japanese people themselves would be the last to admit it. In truth, they would have fought to the very end with sticks and stones. They were conditioned to do it. The Americans put a ghastly and obscene end to the proceedings, but this did the job, caused the end. Of course at terrible cost. Not only to Hiroshima and Japan but to the world as a whole. The Doomsday clock remains set at a few minutes before midnight. Ours is a world of collective madness in which we play a Russian roulette we’ve created for ourselves.Of course racism played a part in the ferocity and brutality too. The Japanese were monkeys, rats, roaches, hardly human. The Americans were uncouth barbarians, a mongrel race of misfits lacking the ‘pure blood’ of the homogenous Japanese. Thus with both sides demonised, dehumanised, the killing of the other was made easier. A brute, a savage was slaughtered, not a man. Standard fare for war, all things considered, but the Pacific War took it to new ferocious levels of inhumanity. There was no Geneva Convention in the Pacific.The waste and carnage of it all is staggering, breathtaking. The war in the Pacific was truly colossal, involving millions and millions of people. Japan’s peaceful post-war Constitution says it has learned from history, but has it? The culture here from where I write (in Japan) is not based on guilt but shame — shame for having for having lost the war, not shame for the guilt of how it was prosecuted. Shame for having failed the Emperor, but no shame for his guilt as a Class-A war criminal. Brainwashed, deluded and fearful, they were exploited by their Emperor, military and government. The peasants did not revolt. Instead, on instructions from above, they attacked the wrong enemy.It is commonly thought that Japan’s surrender was complete and unconditional. Not so entirely. The terms of surrender signed on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the morning of 2 September 1945 allowed the Japanese to keep their Emperor system. Thus one of the greatest causes of their pointless war — mystical belief in the divinity of the Emperor — was retained. Time will tell if this will come to haunt and disturb the world again. I know them and do not trust them. A strong China is better than a strong Japan in Asia.

A very strong and powerful series, a worthy companion to ‘Band of Brothers’. Be warned the episode on Okinawa has some scenes that are tough viewing.

great dvd set lost the first one in a house move, great replacement and value for money...

It's ironic that the word for the planet's largest ocean means "peaceful" when the Pacific theatre of WW2 has become synonymous with probably the bloodiest and most ferocious warfare in human history.Spielberg's 10-episode "Pacific" miniseries in homage to the servicemen who fought against the Japanese in that enormous theatre of war is inevitably compared to its sister-series, the seminal "Band of Brothers" - a serious contender for the best-ever TV drama of any genre. "Pacific" has proved to be more controversial than the almost universally praised BoB for a number of reasons. Here's my take on it.Inspired by Stephen Ambrose's book and with the majority of survivors staying in contact as a cohesive group of veterans who had shared the same experiences in the same unit at the same places and times, BoB was an exceptional opportunity to follow the continuous month-by-month narrative of Easy Company's time in the European theatre. These factors worked in its favor to allow for the realization of a novelistic story developed over 10 hours of TV, diverting only to focus on this or that individual week by week as Easy's campaign took them across Europe in 1944-45. We got to know these men, to care about them and understand them.In contrast, the source material of "Pacific" comes from the stories of three separate individuals: Medal-of-Honor winner and national hero John Basilone killed at Iwo Jima, and survivors Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie who both later (much later) wrote best-selling memoirs about their WW2 experiences in the 1st Marine Division. This more ambitious concept makes for a somewhat fractured narrative, especially after episode 3 set in Australia when the stories of Leckie and Basilone diverge. On first viewing the series, it's not easy for the viewer to stay with who everyone is, especially some of the secondary characters, or to care about them. This definitely improves if you view the series a second time but it must be said that the overall concept, direction and editing might have made a slightly better job of this.Another issue is the extreme contrast between episodes focusing on the uncompromisingly violent and horror-filled combat-zones and those which take place in the USA (mainly focusing on Basilone's time there as a medal-winning national hero being used to sell war bonds, falling in love and getting married etc.), Melbourne (the whole of episode 3) and the Pacific R&R base at Pavavu, including Leckie's time in the hospital. I think in truth this works quite well: this is how the Pacific War was conducted and the format illustrates how extreme was the experience these guys went through whilst fighting the island campaign and how it affected them psychologically. We're shown vividly that compared to the taken-for-granted comforts of peacetime life, being in these island battles was like being on another planet, or entering the Gates of Hell, and it was impossible for anyone not there to even begin to understand what it was like. The contrast is extreme, and illustrated well.A point of objection from some is the amount of profanity in the script. The language is realistic and how these guys in that situation talked: however, it might create some parental-child-viewing decision issues. The combat violence is as extreme as we've ever seen on film: heads blown off, limbs blown off, guts ripped out, Japanese soldiers burned alive. The marines, and the audience, get used to this level of carnage very quickly. As Spielberg says of this series:"It's brutal, and it's honest, and it's right there in your face - as it was for them."Heated debate has been generated here on amazon and elsewhere over the graphic depiction of "atrocities" committed by marines in combat situations. Some viewers find this actually offensive, and it puts them off the series. Well, gold teeth WERE removed from the mouths of dead (and not always dead) Japanese soldiers with bayonets and collected by marines: this is attested by Sledge in his memoir, and by other veterans. The reasons why marines eventually behaved this way was because they were forced to witness persistent Japanese Army atrocities on civilians and captured prisoners, and this was not (in my opinion) explored as fully as it might have been. Japanese soldiers would never surrender, or hardly ever. They fought to the death. The Bushido code created a ruthless, murderous, cruel and fanatical enemy who fought with a suicidal ferocity found in no other army in WW2, and to prevail against an enemy like this US servicemen simply were forced to adapt and do likewise. The process which led to this could have been explored with a bit more illustrative detail.The acting is excellent throughout, often understated and subtle. All the three main leads are superb, especially James Badge Dale playing Robert Leckie with irony, intelligence and wit. Again this is more appreciated on second viewing. Even Rami Malek playing "SNAFU" Shelton who initially comes over as a kind of hard-as-nails psycho type mellows as we get to know him; his character works better on second viewing to reveal him as a bit more complex and nuanced, with a good and caring side, who has learned to cope effectively with the horror of his situation and the continuous loss of friends in his own eccentric way by building a hard shell around himself.Is "Pacific" the equal of BoB? Wrong question. It's different. BoB has a kind of shining nobility personified by the integrity of Dick Winters, played to perfection by British actor Damian Lewis, which ran like a seam of gold through the series. At the conclusion set in late 1945 in Austria, with Lewis' voiceover relating how the survivors of Easy's campaign returned to civilian life, the audience feels genuine heart-affecting emotion. In contrast, by the conclusion of episode 9 (on Okinawa), "Pacific" leaves the audience with something of a downer, drained and dispirited with little to mitigate the relentless carnage, the filth, the dismembered and rotting bodies and marines gradually becoming psychologically more unhinged as their buddies are killed off one at a time. Were these sacrifices worthwhile? There's little indication that any of the surviving marines felt they were. The final episode 10, showing the guys returning home in 1946 and rebuilding their lives, is an excellent and valuable bookender to the story and goes some way to mitigate the gloom, but does not succeed completely in doing so. Don't miss it.Worth seeing? You bet. Watch it twice; it's better the second time round when you have absorbed the mood and start to know the characters better. The extras on the Blu-Ray edition, including the "enhanced viewing" option (consider watching the whole series a second or third time with this facility engaged) are truly excellent. The bios on disc 6 are well worth seeing and bring the real people to life. The musical score is sombre, epic yet understated: near perfection.I'd rate this series about four-and-a-half stars, which is pretty good. It has a lot going for it, but is unlikely to leave you filled with warmth and nobility as did BoB, feeling it was all worthwhile. However if you haven't seen "Pacific", I'd strongly recommend you do. If you tried to watch it already and abandoned viewing part-way through because of any or all of the reasons explored above, give it another try. This series is a notable achievement with its own special character, and it will endure.

Good Series - a complement to BoB & Masters of the Air

Brilliant I highly recommend watching this

Very well made and entertaining

What a great series..just wish there was more like it

El complemento perfecto de Band of Brothers.

Envoi rapide et soigné.Le coffret est neuf, la langue française est présente tant en audio qu'en sous-titre.

Lo consiglio a quelle persone a cui piace e interessa la guerra nel Pacifico .

It's not quite as good as Band of Brothers because The Pacific struggles with maintaining focus. Yes, there is tremendous scope, but I found myself asking a few times: "What's the point?" It's difficult for me to identify what the story's goals were, because the storytelling doesn't really develop its characters and plots very well. I feel that if The Pacific had 13-15 episodes, it could have been a masterpiece. The action is very wearisome because the direction isn't quite as good or interesting. Still a pretty great show, with very good performances and astounding production values. And it also conveys the horrors of the Pacific Theatre very well.Fantastic picture quality on the bluray, very sharp and detailed, and really really colorful. Although I don't like the cinematography as much because it isn't as interesting without the desaturated and gritty look of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. It looks like it was filmed yesterday, which isn't a good thing for a period piece because it ironically looks very artificial.The Sound is mind-blowingly good on the music and sound effects department, but the dialogue seems to fade out into the background noise, and very hard to discern, even on dialogue scenes.Great Purchase and would really recommend!

When I talked to a 1st and 4th Marine Division vet, the reason combat accounts are often vague became very clear to me: "At Saipan, we did a FOUR day assault, which was... the most..." - as he trailed off, I could see his mind discarding a succession of words, and his eyes welled with tears as each attempt took him further back to places he didn't want to go - "... INTENSE... experience". His relief at finally finding that single word - finally free to pull away from the nightmares and resume his story - communicated volumes more to me than any mere adjective.Very few units (never mind individuals) survived the entire Pacific war intact, and those who did can rarely afford to tell us much about it. Thus, in lieu of a single narrative, the producers of "The Pacific" instead pieced together three stories which, taken together, span the experience of the 1st Marine Division throughout World War Two. Leckie and Basilone's accounts cover Guadalcanal, Gloucester and leave in Australia while Sledge's account describes Peleliu and Okinawa, with flashes from Basilone describing life stateside and the landing at Iwo Jima.Several negative early reviews suggest to me that understanding the brilliance of this miniseries requires patience. Indeed, upon a first viewing, "The Pacific" may appear muddled and disjointed as it forcibly juxtaposes three very different story lines at contradictory moments of dramatic inertia. There are two critical reasons for this.One problem for the first five episodes is a matter of source material. It is important to remember that "The Pacific" covers FOUR YEARS of warfare while "Band of Brothers" covers only one. For veterans, the memory of earlier battles (such as Okinawa) tends to get obliterated by the searing intensity of late battles (such as Okinawa). It would be much like trying to recall memories from childhood: you have isolated but extremely vivid scenes etched in your mind, but there is little rhyme or reason connecting them. However, your more recent memories, especially when they are so wrenching, can be recalled almost to the day.The second problem is that of recognizing characters, a issue shared by "Band of Brothers". Many scenes appear to read as, "Some random guy in a helmet tells us this and that". These "guys in a helmet" are not only hard to identify in their combat gear, but also answer to a bewildering variety of names, nicknames, ranks and even rank slang. However, as those who've come to admire the once nameless likes of Hoobler and Shifty from "Band of Brothers" can attest, none of these helmeted figures are as anonymous as they seem, and as viewers go back and review these once random snippets they will discover a wonderfully rich tapestry of personalities that teaches us how the barbarism of war affected these people and their relationships to each other.No one demonstrates this growth better than Joe Mazzello ("Timmmy" from Jurassic Park), who's slight frame evolves Eugene Sledge from a kindly, quiet kid to a bitterly angry vet. James B. Dale may lack the confrontational "bad boy" edge that Robert Leckie's character seems to call for, but his powerful innate decency radiates a layered and humane interpretation that's endlessly watchable. The inner life of John Basilone is not as well known, leaving actor Jon Seda little choice but to play him as a somewhat generic hero for fear of disrespecting a Medal of Honor winner by ascribing motivations that may appear less than courageous. However, Seda is an excellent ensemble actor, most notably developing wonderful romantic chemistry with Annie Parisse in the calm before the storm of Iwo Jima. This actress is just one of the many outstanding co-stars who create memorable sub-plots as they effortlessly perform the period dialog that seems to elude just about every other WWII production.The music is also unusual and daring. Hans Zimmer's New Age sensibilities construct a distinctly Japanese dissonance of bells that quietly envelopes the fury of battle with an unsettling form of Zen that never competes with or interrupts the urgency of combat - quite unlike the standard pounding action score or screeching horror effects that seek to heighten violence in other films. Zimmer also proves he's perfectly capable of writing more conventional title music that evokes a gushingly American sense of honor without ever falling back on snare drum cliches. His title music retains the "Plaisir d'Amour" quote (sung by nuns in an Ardennes convent) and will occasionally replay "Band of Brothers" in its entirety for those listening carefully to background music in certain dialogs.There are, of course, nitpicks, which are inevitable in a project of such massive scope: Leckie's romance central to Part 3 never ignites, American mortars seem to be more accurate than baseballs (even on the first shot), starving, shell-shocked Japanese are somehow perkier and better dressed than fully supplied Marines (or even Okinawan civilians) and the hasty exposition to Part 1 is quite awkward (yes, it's true that that the nation was gloomy, but it's difficult to imagine ANYONE - especially Chesty Puller - assuming the Japanese were on the verge of world conquest barely 3 weeks after Pearl Harbor!) With that said, for every little thing "The Pacific" might get wrong, there is SO much more it gets right that there is little doubt that this series is now the definitive recreation of the Pacific conflict.The latter episodes of "The Pacific" are saturated with intense action and contain some of the most disturbing scenes ever put in a war film, once again reminding me of that conversation with the veteran: "These are things that no human being can possibly deal with. The only thing you can do is 'wall it out'. Guys that couldn't wall it out - officers who were trained to cope by keeping things organized or artists who tried to cope by expressing themselves - these people simply couldn't handle it". Even this man's tremendous skills, inherited from a lifetime in the backwoods, were of no comfort. As a member of an elite recon unit, the Japanese would deliberately let his unit pass then ambush the main body behind him. The number of times that he literally walked *through* the gunsights of hundreds of enemies - each CHOOSING to spare his life - was only one of an endless list of profoundly disturbing things he had to "wall out" just to survive another day... not to mention another year.To quote the series:"You can't dwell on it. You can't dwell on any of it".NOTE: To obtain honest and often intense Japanese accounts of the war, I suggest  Senso: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War: Letters to the Editor of Asahi Shimbun , where a newspaper column provided one of the few opportunities for participants to discuss their experiences on such a politically dangerous topic. Senso: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War: Letters to the Editor of Asahi Shimbun