Re-watching Band of Brothers after having watched All Quiet on the Western Front and Stalingrad

[Not bad]

It opens up with this sappy cornball Hollywood music. I guess I'll keep watching, since I don't remember much else, but I wish more war depictions had the cold and ugly realism of those movies.

 

[guest]

I love Band of Brothers but a) It's a Hollywood production and b) It's Spielberg. A dose of sentimentality is almost mandatory. Americans are optimistic and like happy endings and some sappiness.

 

[SpeckofCoppah_mybb]

A lot of A-list actors make cameos throughout the series (Fassbender, Hardy, Pegg...).
The battle scenes are quality, although some might be a bit easy.
But character depth wise, it's a hit and miss. Spears for example is not well written.
You'll have fun.

 

[UnPRePared]

Watch "Come and See".

Try not to kill yourself afterwards.

 

[Monk]

The Pacific, especially the parts that cover Eugene Sledge's experience, is fucking brutal. Also highly recommend Sledge's war diary With the Old Bleed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Okinawa was hell on earth reminiscent of the Siege of Petersburg or the Battle of Passchendaele. Sledge's description of it is some powerful stuff:

Spoiler

"I had my first opportunity to look around our position. It was the most ghastly corner of hell I had ever witnessed. As far as I could see, an area that previously had been a low grassy valley with a picturesque stream meandering through it was a muddy, repulsive, open sore on the land. The place was choked with the putrefaction of death, decay, and destruction. In a shallow defilade to our right, between my gun pit and the railroad, lay about twenty dead Marines, each on a stretcher and covered to his ankles with a poncho - a commonplace, albeit tragic, scene to every veteran. Those bodies had been placed there to await transport to the rear for burial. At least those dead were covered from the torrents of rain that had made them miserable in life and from the swarms of flies that sought to hasten their decay. But as I looked about, I saw that other Marine dead couldn't be tended properly. The whole area was pocked with shell craters and churned up by explosions. Every crater was half full of water, and many of them held a Marine corpse. The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and water, rusting weapons still in hand. Swarms of big files hovered about them."

"The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn't a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment - utter desolation. The stench of death was overpowering. The only way I could bear the monstrous horror of it all was to look upward away from the earthly reality surrounding us, watch the leaden gray clouds go skudding over, and repeat over and over to myself that the situation was unreal - just a nightmare - that I would soon awake and find myself somewhere else. But the ever-present smell of death saturated my nostrils. It was there with every breath I took. I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogol Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool."

 

[JoeBrotheChildSpitGuzzler]

A lot of A-list actors make cameos throughout the series (Fassbender, Hardy, Pegg...).
The battle scenes are quality, although some might be a bit easy.
But character depth wise, it's a hit and miss. Spears for example is not well written.
You'll have fun.

I enjoyed how unlike some other movies you actually got an idea tactically why they were doing what they did. Most movies just seem to like lots of chaotic violence to represent what war is like but band of brothers had that and also thought through the battles they portrayed

 

[JoshFromMichigan]

I really enjoyed most of it, especially the Battle of the Bulge stuff. For a major Hollywood adaptation, it's probably as good as you can get. The Pacific is really good too, but they added way too much romance bullshit.