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Band of Brothers is 10 years old..

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alphaNoid said:
I'll try to paint what I can recall between the 2 series.

Band of Brothers was compelling in its comradery, storytelling and ability to make you like the soldiers or even feel part of easy company. The pacing of the series is smooth as butter and the action is ripe with enjoyment.

The Pacific is really just flat.. in everything it does. There is maybe 2 action scenes that stick out and the rest of the series is dull, dead, boring and drab. There is no squad to follow, random soldiers, TONS off off shore, on leave footage of their personal lives outside of the war and the overall feel was much more depressing in nature.

I watched The Pacific all the way through, then sold it to a coworker and will never watch it again. On the contrary, BoB is the best TV series I've ever watched... it blows my mind and brings me to tears everytime I watch it through.
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Ouch!

Maybe I should just gift to my dad. I don't think he has a blu-ray player though.

Nah. I'll keep it and try to get around to it.
 
Read the book back in '02 or '03 I believe. Adored the series. I bought the blu-ray years back but still haven't gotten around to going through all of it again.

I was a HUUUUGE WWII enthusiast when I was a teen.
 
Band of Brothers is the greatest mini-series of all time. Really it's a single season of television and companies like HBO seemed to have used it as a both a formula and a benchmark for other projects. After BOB television shows got more serious and of a higher quality overall.

My friend and I were so hyped for The Pacific but it's not even in the same league. It looks way cheaper for one thing, the characters aren't nearly as well fleshed out, and there is a ton of unecessary stuff like romance and on-duty life. None of the big battles got their do and I can't even remember what they looked like.
 
My favourite mini-series ever, easily.

The Pacific was a massive disappointment. I expected it to eventually become interesting, but it never did.

Timbuktu said:
So many nameable British actors today were in Band of Brothers.

Tom Hardy, Jame McAvoy, Damian Lewis, Simon Pegg, Fassbender etc. all as a side character apart from Lewis of course.
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Fassbender's mom was from Northern Ireland, but he was raised in Ireland. I think it's strange to refer to him as "British" considering.
 
I need to watch this, but the whole war thing I find rather unappealing. I'm sure that once I start watching it it will stick but nothing so far has compelled me to start watching it, even such strong recommendations.
 
Best Jimmy Fallon cameo ever.

Best Simon Pegg cameo ever.
 
Strange how you can pick up new things on or 4th or 5th playback. It's been a couple years since I watched some of BoB, but I now noticed that Simon Pegg got it on the plane crash in the 2nd episode, that Lt. Meehan was Terra Nova's Jason O'Mara, and that Michael Fassbender 's character seemingly made it to the end of the war, was on screen a decent bit, but was totally a background character.
 
Lonestar said:
Lt. Meehan was Terra Nova's Jason O'Mara,
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oh_gif.gif
 
The Big Rig said:
Ok, I have one gripe about the 3rd episode that always bugs me:

When the 501st were holding in those woods, with the German infantry and armored coming down the hill, you finally see the Allied armored division come through and take the germans out. There's a guy on one of the tanks, mounted on a turret, that has no expression on his face. He's so nonchalant about firing a turret in the middle of a battle, with nothing protecting him. I couldn't get over how bad an actor that guy was.

Edit: Here's a pic

vlcsnap12440.png
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Heh, I just watched that bit right now. Spike is running a marathon of the mini-series today.
 
My favorite mini series, and i join the opinion about The Pacific, wasn't the same :( most of the characters in my opinion weren't memorable.

Band of Brothes had Buck, Luz, Peconte, Guarnere, Bull, Doc, Winters, Spiers, Nixon, Sobel, Lipton well, almost all the characters were memorable in their own way. Also the interview with the real people who fought in the war were awesome, case in point:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeWXoYHgmTU

I got goosebumps and manly tears after that.
 
i remember my family getting together to watch this every night a new one aired. it was really great.

edit: actually, we did this because of from earth to the moon. this just carried on that tradition.
 
Such an amazing series, and now this thread convinced me to watch it again. I always tear up at the end of the final episode.
Were you a hero in the war?' 'No… but I served in a company of heroes.'"
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Don't know why, gets me every single time.
 
i really want the BD for this. looks like its backordered at BB though. good price... cant check availability in stores though.
 
Seen it twice and it is simply the best miniseries ever made. I was so hyped for Pacific but it ended doing nothing for me :( Still I hope Hanks and the good people @ Playtone will some day make another WWII show. Probably going dust out my BD set and start watching the show today.
 
Holy shit 10 years?? Band of Brothers was truly great. I stopped watching The Pacific after a few episodes cause it sucked so bad.
 
Band of Brothers was so godly. The Pacific was just bad. The battles were pretty much garbage too. Of course it doesn't help that I think the pacific war itself was pretty boring.
 
FStop7 said:
Would be interesting but the perspectives would vary so wildly between the rank and file of the Wehrmacht, the true believers in the SS, the aristocrats of the high command, etc. It would even vary wildly between troops deployed on the eastern vs. western fronts. But yeah, I would definitely be interested to see this. Der Untergang did a respectable job of taking one snapshot of the end days, at least.
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One movie you need to watch from the german perspective is the movie Stalingrad it´s german and follows a german army unit through the siege of stalingrad it´s really depressing but you get to know several of the soldiers.
 
DemiMatt said:
The problem is that THe Pacific focused too much on the soldiers life returning to home and that there wasn't as much brotherhood, it ended up just being hella boring. To me it seemed it was based far more on the individual stories rather than the group as a whole. I really tried to get into it but it just didn't hold a candle to BOB.
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Well it was based on individual stories.
 
jufonuk said:
My claim to fame is I once worked at ITV with Mr Shane Taylor (Doc Eugene Roe), he was a continuity announcer at the time, he is a really nice guy..though I didn't realise that he had been in BoB

I think my work collegue told me and I was like wtf?? cool
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That's pretty cool. Doc Roe is my favorite character on the show.
(That's weird too, to refer to him as a character, considering he is based on a real life person, but I don't know what other term to use atm)
 
I still have not watched it all the way through.

I'm waiting another two years until every single star and extra is in a hit movie or TV show so I can recognize every single person.
 
The Big Rig said:
Ok, I have one gripe about the 3rd episode that always bugs me:

When the 501st were holding in those woods, with the German infantry and armored coming down the hill, you finally see the Allied armored division come through and take the germans out. There's a guy on one of the tanks, mounted on a turret, that has no expression on his face. He's so nonchalant about firing a turret in the middle of a battle, with nothing protecting him. I couldn't get over how bad an actor that guy was.

Edit: Here's a pic

vlcsnap12440.png
Click to expand...



He was just too bad.



As for The Pacific, like others have said, problem is that it doesn't consistently follow one group of soldiers. You don't get a good sense of one stretch of time and you don't get the chance to get attached to one group of people. It felt disjointed.
 
gdt5016 said:
Just finished this for the first time, today. wow.....wow wow wow wow wow.
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Yep, those are the correct words.

I see where Jamesfrom818 is coming from, but it should be worded more like "I'd like to see more footage inbetween the points in time they showed. I'd watch an hour of Muck, Luz, Malarky and Perconte, playing poker and giving each other a hard time.
 
speculawyer said:
Schwimmer.
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What!?! He was fantastic in the series. It's definitely nice to see him away from his FRIENDS role.


It may be 10 years old but its still new and fresh everytime I view it... which is probably 1-2times per month lol. I freaking love it.

The Breaking Point may be my favorite of them all. A Lipton-centric episode was pretty awesome. It's also a very powerful episode.
 
Just thought I'd chime in and say I'm currently rewatching my BoB and Pacific blurays. I thought it would be neat to intermingle them. While I do think BoB was on the whole a better series, I think the Pacific was just fine. It is unfortunate that it had to compete with the greatest miniseries of all time.

Anyway, I found a site that attempted to put all the WWII films made into a chronological order from the dates the events occurred in the war. I took out the Band of Brother and Pacific episodes from the list and came up with this:

The Pacific episode 1
The Pacific episode 2
The Pacific episode 3
The Pacific episode 4
Band of Brothers episode 1
Band of Brothers episode 2
Band of Brothers episode 3
The Pacific episode 5
The Pacific episode 6
Band of Brothers episode 4
The Pacific episode 7
Band of Brothers episode 5
Band of Brothers episode 6
Band of Brothers episode 7
Band of Brothers episode 8
The Pacific episode 8
Band of Brothers episode 9
The Pacific episode 9
Band of Brothers episode 10
The Pacific episode 10


This is currently the order I am watching the show in. With the episodes together, I don't feel that the Pacific plays weaker than BoB, and it's kind of neat seeing the war fought on both fronts simultaneously.
 
I watched this shortly after it came out in school for history class.

Middle school was awesome.

Easily the Best HBO has ever done in my opinion.
 
Drove past the Eagle's Nest in Germany yesterday (which was closed for the winter sadly) on my way to Austria & Czech Republic and had to think about the Bastogne scene when i drove through a snowy forest this morning. Need to rewatch the series again soon on Blu-Ray.
 
Just watched episodes 6 and 7. They both go together and are probably the best of the series. Damn, so good and so sad :/
 
I still can't get over the fact that they devoted an entire episode to a soldier that they thought was killed in WW2... but it turns out he died in like 1967.
 
Fry8 said:
About to finish watching episode 3.

Blithe got shot :(
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Eh, fuck Blithe.

And it feels weird saying that, since that guy really existed, but I did not care for that actor at all. And he didn't really die anyway. Ambrose and some of the members of Easy fucked up and remembered wrong. As firehawk12 said above me.
 
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