Band of Brothers
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Movie Reviews of Band of Brothers
Movie Review: A Cinematic and Dramatic Experience You Will Never Forget
Summary: 5 Stars
Right off the bat, I just want to comment that Band of Brothers is the best dramatic interpretation of World War II events that I have ever seen (think "Saving Private Ryan", but for ten entire episodes). The basic premise of the show is following the 101st Airborne Regiment (a section of the 506th Parachute Regiment) from its entrance into the war ("basic" training) to events such as D-Day, Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, and eventually capturing Hitler's famed "Eagle's Nest" hideout and symbolically ending the European campaign. There are two main reasons why I believe this cinematic masterpiece is the best of all-time:
First, is the realism of the war-action scenes. Whether it was the visual spectacle of hundreds of paratroopers floating down into France on D-Day, the intense street-to-street fighting that was often needed to capture certain landmarks, or the trees exploding from German shells in the woods nearby Bastogne as American soldiers dived for cover, the sheer scope of the cinematography is remarkable and will leave you feeling as if you have the slightest comprehension of what being there "in the flesh" must have been like. I remember when "Saving Private Ryan" was released and many film-goers commented on how realistic the D-Day action was...well, Band of Brothers sustains that realism throughout multiple war events. A sight to behold, at the very least.
However, what really makes Band of Brothers special is its dramatic focus on the men of Easy Company (the 101st). The show starts right from the beginning, with the men receiving the toughest training the army has to offer. Grueling runs up and down the infamous "Curahee" mountain effectively weeded out the best of the best and essentially shaped Easy Co. into perhaps the finest fighting force in the entire U.S. Service. The bond that those men achieved during that training carries over into their combat experience (starting with their drop behind enemy lines on D-Day), and makes for a very personal dramatic experience, as each man really did think of the guy next to him as a brother of sorts. What really impressed me, though, was how each episode seemed to focus on a different dramatic angle to the story. A few that stand out in my mind are...
-How Easy Co. handles the incompetence (leading to lives being needlessly lost in one case) of not one but two different commanders throughout the war.
-The internal struggle of Frank Winters, who initially leads Easy Co. but eventually moves up in rank. Though he is honored by the promotion, he also is a bit uncomfortable in what he perceives as "leaving" his men in the heat of war.
-The devastation that was wreaked in the forests surrounding Bastogne, where more American soldiers (without proper winter clothing) died because of sickness and "trenchfoot" (essentially a completely frozen foot) than due to enemy shelling. Perhaps the saddest moment of the series comes when one Lt. sees his two best friends get their legs blown off trying to help others find cover. The Lt. suffers a nervous breakdown and is never quite the same afterwards.
-The level of shock in the hearts and minds of Easy Co. when they stumble across their first concentration camp and liberate it.
Overall, Band of Brothers will both shock you with the intensity of its war scenes and make you think long and hard about the heavy toll that warfare takes on the human soul. A special treat comes at the tail end of the series, when actually living veterans of Easy Co. appear on camera and tell their experiences firsthand.
For anyone even remotely interested in war drama, this series will blow you away. Also, if I were an instructor teaching the effects of WWII, I can guarantee that I would use multiple clips from this series.
Movie Review: Perfection.
Summary: 5 Stars
Several years go, I saw the first few episodes of this when it first hit HBO. Though I loved it, I took up a night job and couldn't see the last 7 episodes on TV when they first aired. Fast forward to the spring of 2004. I was in college then and my friends decided that instead of pissing our nights away playing videogames and watching anime (ugh, the horror! What an utter fool I used to be!), we'd watch Band of Brothers, one episode a night for a week. Having only seen a few episodes I was enthusiastic to finish the series. The plan to watch one episode a night tanked right away, we ended up watching two a night. We only refrained from watching three or four because honestly, what hardworking college student has four hours to put aside for watching TV on a Wednesday night?
There were differences right away between what I'd seen on TV a few years ago and what I was watching now. At least, I thought it was different - I remembered seeing something "good", but what I watched that spring was simply incredible. I had no concept of what I had been watching when I saw the first episodes during high school. This series is moving, highly emotional, and quite honestly, the best thing I have ever seen on a screen. I will say again for clarity - it is my humble opinion that this is the best thing ever put to film. People write this off as "GI Joe" action and mindless Nazi-killing. I really wonder if they saw the same series I did. If reviewers say that this is only about the action, they've missed the point. The heart of this series is really the men and how they react to combat. I was deeply moved by the characters (especially Dick Winters and Lewis Nixon, played by Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston, respectively), got a sense of the horrors of war (particularly the Normandy jump and the hellish artillery barrage outside Foy), and was brought to the brink of tears multiple times - Bastogne and the aforementioned Foy among others. I am not a man that cries easily, either. My girlfriend (what a gal!) got me the boxed set for Christmas, and after watching the series a second and third time through I can honestly say that if anything, I was more profoundly affected on successive viewings.
As a side note, a friend and I saw Dick Winters speak a couple of weeks after I finished watching Band of Brothers in spring 2004 - anybody who says the characters are unbelievable or unrealistic is absolutely and irrevocably wrong. Winters, the man, was EXACTLY the same as Winters, the character. Standing outside that high school auditorium I'd driven out to (it was filled past capacity), I felt I'd already seen him before - ten hours' worth!. Damian Lewis did one hell of a job portraying his character. Watch the special features ("We Stand Alone Together" particularly) and it's obvious that the rest of the characters are more or less dead-on as well. It's easy to say guys like Bull Randleman and John Martin were cliche or stereotypical, but I suspect that what we see on-screen is closer to reality than we can know. Watching Babe Heffron being interviewed on the special features disc is a good example - in the series, Heffron is a smart-alecky kid from Philadelphia. In interviews, he comes across as an old, smart-alecky guy from Philadelphia. Ditto on Bill Guarnere. In "We Stand Lone Together", Martin comes across as being like his character, Popeye comes across as being like his character, Shifty Powers comes across as being like his character - you get where I'm going with this? I came away thinking that the characters were extraodinarily true to the real men. That's quite a feat in Hollywood these days.
5/5 stars. The series isn't just recommended - it's imperative you see this.
Movie Review: Great story of some of the first and best commandos...
Summary: 5 Stars
First, a quick rejoinder to the bitter people from Sweden and Germany who seem to base their reviews not on the content of the DVD, but on resentment that the US was on the winning side of WWII.I am not sure how we can deal with the fact that this is a "typical" US war movie with the US winning the war in the end. As it stands, we've won more than we've lost, so our war movies tend to be about a winning effort. On the other hand, our experience in Viet Nam has been thoroughly dramatized for the cinema, too. So, we have spent as much time examining our successes as our failures.
And we have known war on our shores as millions were involved in the American Civil War. Not to mention a recent attack that killed 4,000 of our civilians who were not combatants in any way.
Band of Brothers does portray scenes such as looting and the killing of POWs. Some of it was by Americans, some by the French. This is to show that the American and allied troops were not saints. It is an honest assessment of the behavior of our fighting men and women.
As for the people who called Lt. Spiers a war criminal, they missed the entire essence of what the movie was saying: Spiers never killed those POWs, nor did he kill one of his own men, as was rumored. He allowed the rumors to persist because it made him feared. His well documented and well-witnessed exploits in combat are why he was a hero.
Perhaps someday Germans will be honest enough to give us an honest portrayal of the less savory activities of their men in uniform during the second World War, complete with the murder of defenseless civilians, especially the Jews.
Yes, we portray the Germans as sometimes being inept. In other movies, we portray the Americans as being inept. In this DVD set, we portray a British tank commander as being inept. There was no shortage of ineptitude on any side of the war. The fact that the particular unit was highly trained and was competent militarily, is no reason for apology.
So, in a word, if you expect us to be sorry that we won, and that we stopped the spread of Nazism, and the extermination of the Jews, sorry. We just don't feel that way. We won, Europe is free as a result. Deal with it. If you dealt with the shortcomings of the German military in the frank and honest manner that US issues have been portrayed, you'd have more than enough national shame to last the rest of the 1000 year reich.
As for the DVDs, they are magnificent and as good a job of depicting the books as I can imagine. I had no idea that the airborne had origins in the best trained soldiers America produced in WWII. That they trained for 2 straight years before seeing combat is an indication of how thoroughly prepared these men were.
As a paratrooper during the cold war, I never had an inkling of the incredible origins of the original parachute infantry regiments. They are much closer to Airborne Rangers than to today's 82nd Airborne. Or, perhaps I should say, the Airborne Rangers are closer to them.
The DVDs are fascinating first and foremost because it portrays the humanity of the men involved. They had lives before and after the war. They had families, they had friends. As I read the book, the movie is very realistically portrayed. Criticisms about the DVDs in terms of realism have been petty at best. This is a very, very well done cinematic achievement.
Sorry about the rant, but it seems that euro-trash never misses an opportunity to try and tear down our country. Envy. That's all it could possibly be. Envy and knowledge of their inadequacy. And perhaps some introspection as to why they were willing to let Saddam kill 200,000 a year, while doing nothing, then cursed the brave men and women who put Saddam's regime to and end.
Movie Review: Greatest WW2 Dramamentary ...
Summary: 5 Stars
Lots of Hollywood efforts toward dramatizing WW2 look too glossy, make the death too sanitized or far flung gore. Human relations are usually lost, and love stories thrown in to grab the girls. It becomes about the grit, the determination, and the supermen on the line. But, in this mini-series you get actual relations of people in the military ranks, to leadership, to each other, and shows them dealing with the chaos of war in a very human approach and without piles of blood and intestines strewn through the shots to hammer home the idea that someone died.
Made by the 'Private Ryan' heads, I found this film much better. 'Private Ryan' was rather boring. It did what it had to do - punctuate the hell of D-Day, and then get you into the closer fighting in towns, and the lack of orientation that must happen in heated battles. But 'Ryan' seemed like a comic book compared to this adaptation of a book by a US soldier in WWII. 'Band Of Brothers' takes you through the entire experience of the war, and makes it work by making a stew of solid entertainment crafted from great acting, great writing and script editing, great directing (most times), great lighting, great effects, great characters, great settings, and wonderful detail. Is it precisely historic? Who can really say? The Euros and war-sissies always get strung out on anything that isn't their view of events from a distant seat. From what I know of WW2 and how people are under pressure in situations of danger, this sure seems absolutely plausible. But, what does it matter? The purpose of this is to create an escapism drama wrapped around real people and events. And it succeeds 110%.
The weakest facet of most all dramatic simplifications of complex histories is that they can easily lose many people that are not intimately aware of the geography, time line, or greater events surrounding the subject portrayed. 'Band of Brothers' would have really been aided by the old standard of a map with arrows animating along to show how the troops were progressing, or where they were at every part of the story (usually beginning of episodes). It really was getting confusing during the battle of the bulge when the 101st was surrounded, but you never get the idea they were truly surrounded or cut off, and have no idea where this all is taking place; fox holes, town, blue lighting, yellow lighting, two worlds apart, people say things, we can't tell what is going on, somehow it is connected.
Despite the nay saying, this really does show a lot of the earthy and practical attitudes of Americans under fire. Some falter, some crack, some die, some harden themselves, some are afraid, some fool hardy, and true to the history they make it work by applying pressure and standing ground. You can tell how everyone is changed by the war, and how most will go back home and have trouble sleeping for decades to come after all they were through. Contrary to the soldier who commented a while back, I remember seeing a documentary that related how Eisenhower came into Berlin, or some part of Germany at the end of the war, saw the unshaven, sloppy, dirty, US soldiers contrasted against the clean, proper lines and energy of the Germans, and said something like, 'We have to do something. Our soldiers look like sacks of garbage.' And thus, Ike got the army uniform trimmed. 'Band' shows the men slowly becoming dirtier, more unkempt, and scattered through the heavy battles up to the end of the war when they cleaned up very well after the pressure was off. I don't envy the men of WW2, but I sure do thank them for a job well done. And I thank Hanks/Spielberg for dramatizing it so effectively.
Movie Review: A miniseries in the tradition of Saving Private Ryan
Summary: 5 Stars
Catapulted by momentum from "Saving Private Ryan", the astounding achievement of "Band of Brothers" was badly undermined by its ill-timed September 11th premiere. Based on the book by the late Stephen Ambrose, this HBO series follows Easy Company, an elite American airborne (parachute) company, all the way from training camp to German occupation duty. The death toll amongst these men was horrific, and reverence for their sacrifice clings onto every frame. Scattered hopelessly across Normandy, this unit wrenched the crucial town of Carentan from ammo-starved Germans, participated in the massive airborne debacle of Operation Market Garden (rescuing many British paratroopers), suffered horrible losses in at the Battle of the Bulge, held off an "offensive" at Haguenau, and finally seized the "Eagle's Nest", Hitler's personal luxury perch in the mountains.The highly effective style pioneered by "Saving Private Ryan" (steady-cam with washed out colors) suffuses the entire series with a gritty documentary feel. Occasionally an obvious CGI or studio shot will clash with lush location shooting, but overall the production values are staggering. Even minor historical details are studiously reproduced, but, like "Private Ryan", the camera never wallows in indulgent spectacle. The miniseries format is used to full advantage to present a truly comprehensive account of war from a wide variety of viewpoints that normally can't be appreciated. Since the events of history itself do not neatly line themselves up in the sort of dramatic arc viewers are accustomed to, some may leave the series with a sense that it is dramatically uneven. Each episode, usually a bit over an hour long, is elegantly introduced in both mood and content by interviews with actual survivors from the company.
Like the best of war films, the emphasis is not on bloodshed and action, but on human relationship and suffering within the company. The performances, by a dedicated cast of largely unknown players, are uniformly excellent, but very little help is given to the first time viewer in identifying the multitude of war-weary faces (often, even after several important appearances, a character's full name is never mentioned). While this can be frustrating for new viewers, it allows for dialogue unencumbered by forced introductions and creates immense replay value, with new insights appearing with every viewing.
The character confusion is alleviated nicely by some of the DVD's reference features. Accompanying each episode is a picture gallery of the important names and faces in that episode, as well as a glossary of terminology and the general locations within Europe. A somewhat less useful timeline is included, and a few of the most important characters are given nice dramatic collages (perhaps used when promoting the series).
The DVD offers 5.1, DTS, and surround sound, all of which are richly spectacular. Only Spanish is offered in subtitle, and (unfortunately) no commentary tracks accompany any of the episodes. A 30 minute "Making Of" feature briefly describes techniques used in filming in a promotional sort of way, but it is not as promotional as a feature describing the gala screening at Normandy (very few of the veteran's reactions are shown) nor as obnoxious as a Jeep advertisement that somehow snuck onto the disc.
Two further wonderful additions are provided in the DVD: a full and moving documentary, consisting solely of the gripping interviews of Easy Company's survivors, and Ron Livingston's (Office Space) thorough and very likeable video diary of the actor's boot camp.