No one does misty-eyed reverence for the bravery and sacrifices of American soldiers in World War II like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
The Academy Award-winning actor and director teamed up in 1998 to make "Saving Private Ryan", the story of a group of U.S. soldiers who go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper (Matt Damon) whose brothers have been killed in action. Three years later, they collaborated as co-executive producers with Gary Goetzman to make "Band of Brothers," the HBO miniseries about a U.S. Army company of paratroopers and its WW2 mission in Europe.
Tonight marks the premiere of their latest World War II project: "The Pacific," an HBO miniseries tracking the real-life journeys of three Marines across the Pacific Theater (9 p.m. Sunday, March 14, HBO). While the 10-part series mirrors the previous films in its depictions of battlefield heroism and the physical toll of war, it also goes one step further.
In tracing the wartime experiences of Private First Class Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), Sgt. John Basilone (Jon Seda) and PFC Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), the miniseries also depicts their bittersweet returns home after V-J Day.
Filmed primarily in Australia, the black-of-night battle scenes depicting the the 1st Marine Division's firefights with entrenched Japanese forces on Guadalcanal leave you guessing at the chaos and the carnage that's more fully realized in the light of day.
In the first three episodes reviewed from the miniseries, Leckie, a former newspaper sportswriter who enlists and becomes a 1st Marine Division machine gunner, is depicted as the conscience of his unit. A conscience with a sense of mischief, such as when he makes off with a newly arrived Army officer's impractical (but oh so comfortable) pair of moccasins and a box of cigars during a mid-day looting of an Army camp by Marines.
After earning the Medal of Honor for his key role in repelling a nighttime Japanese attack at Guadalcanal, a haunted Basilone struggles with the Marine Corps' request that he return home as a hero to help promote the selling of U.S. war bonds.
The miniseries is less than subtle in spelling out the human costs and sacrifices demanded by the war's Pacific Theater of Operations. When Sledge, who at first is unable to enlist because of a heart murmur, finally gets a clean bill of health, his physician father tells him a story of how he treated WWI soldiers who had their souls stripped out by what they lived through.
And yet, there's no denying the lump-in-the-throat moments that you see coming a mile away. You've seen the scene many times before in other war movies and miniseries, but the farewell family dinner for Basilone where he and his Italian immigrant father exchange a sad, meaningful glance remains powerful.
Basilone's brother has just raised a toast to his safe return after what the brother mistakenly believes will be a one-year absence to resolve the war, but the look shared by Basilone and his father suggests both men know it won't be that easy.
And when the weary Marines are welcomed in Melbourne, Australia by cheering crowds after four brutal months in Guadalcanal, the look on Basilone's face when an awestruck Australian boy asks him, "How many Japs you kill, Yank?" hints at the disconnect between the outsiders' cheers and the horrible memories that the soldiers carry from their experience.
The miniseries meanders through the soldiers' wartime romances and various entanglements off the battlefield - Leckie's R-and-R in Melbourne leads to a passionnate fling with a young woman with Greek parents who apparently are deaf or able to sleep through the freight train sounds of their daughter and Leckie's lovemaking.
What stays with you, though, is the knowledge that the characters who survived those bloody battles of the Pacific clearly suffer the spiritual toll of what they experienced overseas.
