"The Pacific": Exclusive Iwo Jima featurette

Watch an exclusive featurette about the battle of Iwo Jima for HBO's The Pacific, nominated for 24 Primetime Emmys and coming out on DVD and Blu-ray on November 2. See more in The Pacific Store. --David

Comments

[setnaffa on July 20, 2010 at 06:28 AM]

Makes one realize how special the US Marines really are...

[Leslie on July 20, 2010 at 06:36 AM]

Can you imagine Joe BiteMe as VP during WWII?

[BabaLoo on July 20, 2010 at 11:00 AM]

Does Tom Hanks feel that Americans in the Pacific during WWII were more or less as racist as the black USDA official that refused to help the white farmer, because he was white?
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/19/clip-shows-usda-official-admitting-withheld-help-white-farmer/
"I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him," she said. "Here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land -- so I didn't give him the full force of what I could do"
.
Tom Hanks feels that the only that drove us in the Pacific of WWII was racism, I'd like an update from him about that.

[WT Door on July 20, 2010 at 08:00 PM]

I am a retired US Marine rifleman, and the son of a WWII US Navy carrier sailor. I thought Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers - both of which are likewise creations of the Spielberg/Hanks partnership - are the two finest cinematic portrayals of men at war ever produced.

Alas, The Pacific, reflects the rancid politics of Hollywood and the current White House/Mainstream Media (but I repeat myself) theme of racist white men mercilessly slaying the inscrutable though guiltless "other".

I kept count on some recurring themes. The Marines portrayed by Tom Hanks certainly live up to his professed view of the islands campaign. In The Pacific, the Americans carried the day with relentless atrocities and bizarre battlefield behavior. Hmm. The opposite of reality. The realism wrt crack-ups, broken spirit etc is incessant. It's not that a little of that goes a long way; rather, a lot of that goes too far. It makes a great point, unlike anything before it. But it made it early and never stopped. The Japanese actually come out looking relentlessly determined, and one can imagine, in great spirits. Their penchant for fanatical charges and Terminator-like staying power is portrayed as heroic by comparison with our PTSD-wasted Marines. How's that for a twisted take?

I admit I started watching it already pissed off by Hanks' comments - which he never retracted. But if you analyze the series scene-by-scene, battle-by-battle, and installment-by-installment our Boys are portrayed overwhelmingly as heartless victors and battlefield burnouts. The real Marines falsely portrayed by Hanks epitomize his cheapshot charge about the racist Americans - an accusation I'm getting particularly tired of hearing in these Obama-inspired post-racial times.

Too bad for the idea of an updated realistic portrayal of the Marines in the Pacific by Hollywood. This will be the new standard I suppose. Except it declined drastically in its first-run viewership precisely because of its anti-hero depiction of whack-o Marines butchering the brave but doomed Japanese. Band of Brothers and Pvt Ryan of course WERE a new standard. The Pacific is all those two great videos were wrt equipment and blood-and-gore realism; but, is greatly diminished by its morbidity and persistent gloom.

I've re-watched BoB and Pvt R probably 3-4 times. I just won't watch this one again. And I won't buy the DVDs. I suspect other Marine viewers are seeing it the same way.

Oh, and then there's the sex... Nothing like projecting our own licentious mores on the youth of a different more wholesome time and place. Hollywood jumps the shark, again! Explicit humping and America bashing replaces historical truth-telling. Same old Hollywood crap, really. Hanks and Spielberg as schlockmeisters and Dem agit-propagandists! Who knew?

A note to underinformed viewers who will take this as yet another example of Hollywood speaking truth to power: The pre-1945 Japanese were a horrifically cruel foe - who only got more so as the culminating battles of WWII finally reached their home islands. Before you conclude that we matched their cruelty - or exceeded it as told by Mr Hanks - please read up on the Rape of Nanking, and their treatment of fellow Asians as a minimum starting point. The war in the Pacific was a righteous cause and nobly fought by the United States Marines and brave American Soldiers, Sailors and Aimen, as well as Allied armed forces - mostly men who are no longer with us to defend the honor that Tom Hanks has so glibly trashed.

Emmy Awards? So what! Hollywood peer reviews itself. The Pacific will be in the bargain bins by Christmas. I still won't buy it.

[xiao on November 11, 2010 at 05:38 PM]

Nothing like projecting our own licentious mores on the youth of a different more wholesome time and place.