WRITERS: Robert Schenkkan & Graham Yost[SPOILERS] The best episode so far, but still one that caused me to question my commitment to The Pacific, which has so far failed to grab me on any level. It's beginning to puzzle me that the budget for this miniseries is a stratospheric $150m, as so little appears to be up on-screen. Also, if you watch a war drama you want two things: "war" and "drama". And so far there's been very little of either that's felt estimable, and certainly nothing to rival its spiritual predecessor Band Of Brothers...
DIRECTOR: Graham Yost
This week, we went through the battle of Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, which again featured a disorientating night fight against some Japanese soldiers. I know you can't rewrite history, but it's beginning to irritate me that we haven't had a truly comprehensible battle in daylight in four hours of television. The first half of Part Four earned points for a few nicely delivered scenes, at leasr: a crazy US marine throttling an injured Jap in front of his horrified comrades, and Leckie (James Badge Dale) witnessing a French soldier's suicide. Oh yes, cowardly French allies and a Japanese enemy that amounts to wary-crying shadows that just get gunned down, that's the level we're writing at.
The passage of time is also still a problem for me. We're given month and year legends on-screen, thankfully, but little sense that weeks are actually passing. You sometimes wonder why everyone's so dispirited by a few days of rain, when I guess weeks and perhaps months have passed living in those conditions, but there's just no sense of time to how the stories unfold. Did the battle of Cape Gloucester last three days, three weeks, or three months? I have no idea. And was it really much of a battle? A few skirmishes in the night was all I saw.
Moving on to the island of Pavuvu, Leckie disintegrates mentally, not helped by the fact he's suffering from enuresis (an inability to control his bladder) and is constantly wetting himself. This social embarrassment, the bad weather and near-constant state of alerteness takes its toll and Leckie is sent for medical treatment in a military "funny farm". There he trades quips with a mild-mannered shrink and meets Gibson (Tom Budge), a comrade who's been deemed insane after trying to kill himself while on duty. Gibson's the crazy marine Leckie saw strangling that Japanese soldier on New Britain, but I only realized that in conversation with a friend afterwards, such highlights the problem trying to remember faces and names on a show like this.
Part Four was definitely better than its preceding hours because there were more layers to its story, but I still find that nothing's hitting me emotionally. Battles are being fought that I don't have any investment in (indeed, I'm often surprised they're considered important enough to have names!), no characters beyond Leckie have been developed to any significant degree, the passing of time isn't being felt dramatically (would it hurt to put a few "X Days Later" legends up?), and I haven't been all that impressed by any of the action sequences. That said, hyphenate Graham Yost (Speed, Justified) has done the best job of any of his peers so far.
Overall, maybe I'm being too hard on The Pacific, or my expectations need lowering, but I don’t think the creators have approached the material the right way. The Pacific campaign is undeniably more fractured and less accessible to a traditional narrative than the European theatre was, but even allowing for that these episodes have been thin on characterisation and lack exciting plots. There are a modicum of interesting moments and amusing dialogue in every hour, with perhaps a few minutes of diverting battle if you're lucky, but not much else. The buzz was huge for this show, and I've read some very positive reviews, but I'm just not feeling it.
Asides
- Leckie's writing very strange, depressing letters to Vera, isn’t he? A sign of his madness, or is he just too honest for his own good? Incidentally, I wish we cared about Vera, but I forget if we've ever even met her now. It would have been better if he was writing to the Greek girl he fell in love with last week, don't you think? At least we can picture her face.
- It's been many years since I saw Band Of Brothers, but were the German soldiers just faceless bullet-fodder as The Pacific's Japanese are?
- I'm thinking of fast-forwarding through the opening documentary featurettes now, because each one just spoils the gist of what the drama's going to tackle. And it's crazy that it takes 7 minutes for the episode to actually start, after the featurette and protracted opening titles.
- I was led to believe this miniseries would focus on Leckie, Basilone and Sledge, but with Basilone sent home and Sledge still in training, was that a wise creative decision? It's given the show a very disorderly feel, as I'm sure there are people who don't even realize Sledge and Basilone are so important. After four hours, Leckie's benefitted the most from the attention, but I wish more of his fellow marines had been developed. What's so wrong with just focusing on, say, five characters in Leckie's platoon, and following them through various battles?
