I love Band of Brothers, I genuinely believe it's a masterpiece. Memorable characters, incredible viceral battle sequences, great score, and there's a real arc to it. You follow mostly the same group of men from training to the end of the war.
Years later we got Paciffic, which is fine but never really reached the heights of Band of Brothers. The cast was much less likeable, the setting less interesting, the story arc less captivating, the music less stiring.
And now many, many years later we get this final part of the trilogy, and as much as I was looking forward to it, it's a bit of a miss-fire.
It starts off pretty well, the battle sequences are spectacular for the most part and I was settled in to follow these men through the war. Sadly the show had other ideas, and as cast members started dropping like flies they were replaced by new faces again and again. Not the fault of the show necessarily, a lot of men died during WW2, but it certainly makes forming any sort of attachment to the cast more difficult.
Then there are the battles, and the lack of them. By about the 1/3 point the show really starts trimming the battles down considerably to the point where by the half way point they barely exist. It reaches peack silliness when characters leave to go on a mission, only for the show to cut to the aftermath without showing us so much as a single second of them in the air. Even D-Day falls foul to this with barely 10 seconds of the battle shown.
Perhaps to compensate for this there is plenty of ground based things to watch. There are some prisoner of war camps, a rather pointless romantic side plot, and lots of chit chat in the barracks, but this is supposed to be telling the story of WW2 from the air.
The cast is a mixed bag too. Austin Butler I can only imagine has it written into his contract to never have so much as a scratch on him or a single hair out of place which looks increasingly ridiculous as the war goes on, and he's also still acting as if he's playing Elvis. The rest of the cast is better if unmemorable. Even the score feels a little phoned in.
This isn't a bad show, it's just not what it should have been. It clearly lacks the budget required, which is odd given the pedigree and Apple's deep pockets, and perhaps it also it lacks ambition and talent. It's the worst of the Hanks/Spielberg WW2 trilogy by some margin, but is nevertheless still worth a watch if you're interested in the time period.
Years later we got Paciffic, which is fine but never really reached the heights of Band of Brothers. The cast was much less likeable, the setting less interesting, the story arc less captivating, the music less stiring.
And now many, many years later we get this final part of the trilogy, and as much as I was looking forward to it, it's a bit of a miss-fire.
It starts off pretty well, the battle sequences are spectacular for the most part and I was settled in to follow these men through the war. Sadly the show had other ideas, and as cast members started dropping like flies they were replaced by new faces again and again. Not the fault of the show necessarily, a lot of men died during WW2, but it certainly makes forming any sort of attachment to the cast more difficult.
Then there are the battles, and the lack of them. By about the 1/3 point the show really starts trimming the battles down considerably to the point where by the half way point they barely exist. It reaches peack silliness when characters leave to go on a mission, only for the show to cut to the aftermath without showing us so much as a single second of them in the air. Even D-Day falls foul to this with barely 10 seconds of the battle shown.
Perhaps to compensate for this there is plenty of ground based things to watch. There are some prisoner of war camps, a rather pointless romantic side plot, and lots of chit chat in the barracks, but this is supposed to be telling the story of WW2 from the air.
The cast is a mixed bag too. Austin Butler I can only imagine has it written into his contract to never have so much as a scratch on him or a single hair out of place which looks increasingly ridiculous as the war goes on, and he's also still acting as if he's playing Elvis. The rest of the cast is better if unmemorable. Even the score feels a little phoned in.
This isn't a bad show, it's just not what it should have been. It clearly lacks the budget required, which is odd given the pedigree and Apple's deep pockets, and perhaps it also it lacks ambition and talent. It's the worst of the Hanks/Spielberg WW2 trilogy by some margin, but is nevertheless still worth a watch if you're interested in the time period.
