Masters has depressed me more than I can say, all the more because I spent ten years researching and writing a novel about a bombardier who flies first in the 92nd, then in the 351st over Schweinfurt, and is then a prisoner of Stalag Luft III (amidst other adventures). It is a world I know well, and while Masters gets a lot of things rig…
Masters has depressed me more than I can say, all the more because I spent ten years researching and writing a novel about a bombardier who flies first in the 92nd, then in the 351st over Schweinfurt, and is then a prisoner of Stalag Luft III (amidst other adventures). It is a world I know well, and while Masters gets a lot of things right, the cookie-cutter characters and ridiculously weak script is coupled with wooden performances.
One of the hardest things to convey about the early air was was the sheer amount of carnage engendered by the combination of a bad idea (precision daylight bombing was a bullshit theory conceived by non-combatants with no practical experience) with the stubborn intractability of Bullwinkle saying "this time for sure!" Even Clark Gable's propaganda film made during the war with the 351st to encourage enlistment showed a bomb run exploding harmlessly in a field near the target while he intones "Way to lay it on them, boys!"
People died at an alarming rate, and you never saw them again. The bunks emptied out, and every day was more of the same. Fifty below on oxygen for eight hours while beautifully made German machine shot at you coming and going. Sometimes it was a milk run and they never saw a fighter, and other times it was a meat grinder. Masters quickly jumped away from the greatest air campaign of the war, Big Week. It was as though it no longer mattered. Shitty storytelling.
Band of Brothers came out right after 9/11 and featured charismatic actors and a dynamite script with a simple story of good versus evil, heroism versus cowardice (often bending the truth to smear officers like Norman Dike, whose reputation never recovered from the portrayal). Ambrose's book is based on extensive interviews with many surviving members, so the resulting script gave the actors a lot to work with. Ron Livingston's Lewis Nixon was especially winning, IMO.
The Pacific, on the other hand, was drawn from what Paul Fussell called "the greatest combat memoir ever written," Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed, as well as Robert Leckie's 1957 Helmet for My Pillow. The latter book is very much of its era, with wisecracking tough Marines in the model of Mailer or Audie Murphy. Everybody has a nickname, everybody is brave, the Japanese are monsters, etc. It's a good read but not particularly revealing.
Basilone, on the other hand, suffers from his immense heroisom and status as the ultimate Marine. His romance was real enough, but in reality Jon Seda is much too small a man (and an actor) to play him, so his character is pretty flimsy. Basilone should have been characterized as a superhero, because that's what he was and what everybody who knew him said he was.
The Pacific's main failing (as far as popularity) is that it is the best film about war that's ever been made, and in being such is gruesome, horrific, and utterly without redemption. That war was the most brutal and least romantic of any modern conflict up to that point, with both sides viewing one another as subhuman. There was never any attempt to explore the Japanese side of the equation, nor of the larger issues that led to the war; that would have been outside the scope. As it was, the production damn near bankrupted HBO and Playtone because the realism was not cheap. It was also not popular. It is, however, largely accurate.
As Tim O'Brien so eloquently wrote:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you
feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been
made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no
virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
The Pacific did too good of a job showing what the war was like in that theater. I kind of wish they had just followed the 1st Marine Division from Guadalcanal through to Okinawa adding in Sledge when he came aboard. Basilone could have had his own mini series.
Masters has depressed me more than I can say, all the more because I spent ten years researching and writing a novel about a bombardier who flies first in the 92nd, then in the 351st over Schweinfurt, and is then a prisoner of Stalag Luft III (amidst other adventures). It is a world I know well, and while Masters gets a lot of things right, the cookie-cutter characters and ridiculously weak script is coupled with wooden performances.
One of the hardest things to convey about the early air was was the sheer amount of carnage engendered by the combination of a bad idea (precision daylight bombing was a bullshit theory conceived by non-combatants with no practical experience) with the stubborn intractability of Bullwinkle saying "this time for sure!" Even Clark Gable's propaganda film made during the war with the 351st to encourage enlistment showed a bomb run exploding harmlessly in a field near the target while he intones "Way to lay it on them, boys!"
People died at an alarming rate, and you never saw them again. The bunks emptied out, and every day was more of the same. Fifty below on oxygen for eight hours while beautifully made German machine shot at you coming and going. Sometimes it was a milk run and they never saw a fighter, and other times it was a meat grinder. Masters quickly jumped away from the greatest air campaign of the war, Big Week. It was as though it no longer mattered. Shitty storytelling.
Band of Brothers came out right after 9/11 and featured charismatic actors and a dynamite script with a simple story of good versus evil, heroism versus cowardice (often bending the truth to smear officers like Norman Dike, whose reputation never recovered from the portrayal). Ambrose's book is based on extensive interviews with many surviving members, so the resulting script gave the actors a lot to work with. Ron Livingston's Lewis Nixon was especially winning, IMO.
The Pacific, on the other hand, was drawn from what Paul Fussell called "the greatest combat memoir ever written," Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed, as well as Robert Leckie's 1957 Helmet for My Pillow. The latter book is very much of its era, with wisecracking tough Marines in the model of Mailer or Audie Murphy. Everybody has a nickname, everybody is brave, the Japanese are monsters, etc. It's a good read but not particularly revealing.
Basilone, on the other hand, suffers from his immense heroisom and status as the ultimate Marine. His romance was real enough, but in reality Jon Seda is much too small a man (and an actor) to play him, so his character is pretty flimsy. Basilone should have been characterized as a superhero, because that's what he was and what everybody who knew him said he was.
The Pacific's main failing (as far as popularity) is that it is the best film about war that's ever been made, and in being such is gruesome, horrific, and utterly without redemption. That war was the most brutal and least romantic of any modern conflict up to that point, with both sides viewing one another as subhuman. There was never any attempt to explore the Japanese side of the equation, nor of the larger issues that led to the war; that would have been outside the scope. As it was, the production damn near bankrupted HBO and Playtone because the realism was not cheap. It was also not popular. It is, however, largely accurate.
As Tim O'Brien so eloquently wrote:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you
feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been
made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no
virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
The Pacific did too good of a job showing what the war was like in that theater. I kind of wish they had just followed the 1st Marine Division from Guadalcanal through to Okinawa adding in Sledge when he came aboard. Basilone could have had his own mini series.
Thank you for your comments, helps me understand all of what I've seen much better.