Not perfect, but the best effort yet! (Band Of Brothers - The Complete Series (6 DVDs))

Member Name: garethgazz

Product:	Band Of Brothers - The Complete Series (6 DVDs)
Date:	04/04/05 (700 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Authenticity/in depth, Re-watchability!, Some cracking performances

Disadvantages: Some confusion, Some dodgy graphics, Factual errors

Band of Brothers... a massive massive project, how do you review something so huge?

To begin with, i suppose it's important to state that Band of Brothers (BoB) is based as accurately as possible on the REAL MEN AND EVENTS of Easy Company, 101st Airborne in WW2. The production team was helped by constant phone calls and interviews with the men themselves and Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the book which the mini series is based on, also named Band of Brothers.

Also, to appreciate what kind of an undertaking this really was, you need to understand basic American military units of the time.

Regiment - Three Battalions and a HQ usually run by a Colonel.
Battalion - Three Companies and a HQ usually run by a Major.
Company - Three Platoons and sometimes a HQ usually run by a Captain. 120 men
Platoon - Three Squads usually run by a Lieutenant. 40 men
Squad - Usually run by a Sergeant or Corporal (usually as 2nd in command). 10 -15 men

We don't need to go any higher in rank than that for the purposes of this review, also, the numbers do differ slightly according to circumstances, but more or less, that's what you've got.

There are ten parts to the series, each an hour long, taking us from the units creation at Camp Toccoa, all the way through the jump on Normandy on D-Day, the jump on Holland and Operation Market Garden, Bastogne, Haganau, Berchestgarden, the concentration camps, and finally Hitlers Eagle's Nest. Each episode begins with short snippets of interviews from the real men of Easy Company concerning the issues raised in that particular episode.
All the way through we get to know the men who formed Easy Company and those who replaced them when they fell.

The series seems to be more a collection of events put into a timeline than a written story, which is understandable seeing as the writers could take no liberties with the script, but a bi-product of that is that you don't have a 'lead' character with a clear objective as you do in a conventional film script.
They try to make it Richard Winters, the Lieutenant (then Captain) of Easy Company who laters ends up helping to run the whole battalion.
As well as this they employ another scriptwriting device, which is to give each inidividual episode a more central character who's story we follow through the hour, running into the other soldiers we are getting to know from the Company along the way. Usually this is one of the officers.
Then we have the 1st supporting roles (Guarnere, Luz, Toye, Skip Muck, Malarky etc) which appear frequently and who's characters are strong and well defined throughout the series and as a result, we feel we know them well by the end. These are collectively the Company's non commissioned officers, the Sergeants.
And then we have the 2nd supporting roles which are men we recognise, and who's names we have heard mentioned, but wish we had found out more about or wonder what happened to at the end (Penkala, Sisk, Hashey, More, Christensen etc).
PLUS all the one liner or small roles found in any piece of film making. There were over 500 speaking parts in this series!

With that in mind, my next comment may seem ridiculous, but never the less as with any film or television programme all the characters should be clearly identifiable if we are to care about them.
Now, BoB had as much need for minor roles as any film, but because it was fully authentic those minor roles had to be real men from Easy Company, and because we, as an audience know that the man we can't put a name to being shot in the chest was indeed a real person and was actually shot in the chest in much the same way as we are watching, we want to know him better.
Added to this confusion, if you stick 40 men in army uniforms and cut their hair they are all going to look pretty similar, so you've got to work hard to differentiate them all clearly enough.
So in that respect the production team couldn't win, they couldn't possibly introduce us to 120 men plus replacements as the war went on, it would take years of television. But it's still something that niggles at the mind a little. But as i said, it is catch 22.

However, some things, like the confusion between two characters (Hoobler and Malarky) who both talk about wanting to find a German Luger (Pistol) as a souvenir, could have been avoided. It is easy to confuse these men as one and the same because they were given the same stand out personality characteristic, they both wanted a Luger. It would seem pretty obvious just to focus on ONE of the mens obsession with this war prize, thus avoid the confusion.
Guarnere's personality was impossible to confuse with anyone else's. Luz did the impressions, Muck was the funny man, 'Bull' Randleman's heavy Southern accent and cigar chomping are un-forgettable. They did all this with SO many characters, plus having to deal with nick-names for character relations, but now and again confusion crept in. On the whole, they did a great job though.

Character wise it was very diverse, and well handled. They stuck to mostly the original members of Easy and a few of the first set of replacements. As the war went on more and more men went home killed or unable to fight and needed to be replaced. This is addressed and is ever present but we don't really get to know any other the replacements after the first bunch, and even then there's only 'Babe' Heffron, Leo Hashey, Tony Garcia, James Miller and Lietenant Peacock who are introduced, and all are fairly minor characters except possibly Heffron.
We meet the occasional replacement further on down the line, but they are usually just in a handfull of scenes before being killed or forgotten about (Julian KIA, Webb KIA, Suerth WIA, O'Keefe)

I have mixed feelings about the graphics. Computer wise, not great, but the hands on stuff (squibbs, explosions etc) wow! Up-close shots of all kinds of injuries (including a man being squashed by a tank) looked very realistic indeed and really made me realise the horror and almost feel pain in some cases. The computer generated back drops etc didn't look so great. The planes on D-Day flying towards France looked quite bad really, and the backdrop in Bastogne wasn't that brilliant either, but it wasn't so bad that it detracted from the experience.

My only real problem with this series is that it made a few slip ups fact wise.
In one episode a character named Albert Blithe is shot in the throat and we are told that he died a few years later in 1948. Throughout the episode he is in, he is portrayed having problems operating under fire. Whether or not this is true i don't know, but i suspect they needed a character to show the audience another point of view of the war, the guy who couldn't handle it as well as other men. My guess is they picked Blithe because not only was he KIA (supposedly) but he experienced 'hysterical blindness' during the attack on Carentan and lost his sight.
In actual fact Blithe recovered from his wounds and went on to serve in Korea, make over 400 combat jumps and earn many medals, and died in 1967! That's a pretty big gaff, and is unforgivable when dealing with a real person and their life. Many millions of people will believe what they were told in the mini series, and that is unfair to the real man, who actually turned out to be a bit of a hero.
One of the veterans told them he attended Blithe's funeral, and that is why they made the mistake, but they should have double checked. For a man with such an illustrious record, it wouldn't have been too difficult to find out otheriwse.

However this was by far the biggest mistake and the others are few and quite minor, even if they were done with artisitc lisence, which is questionable at all with a series so heavily publicised as being 100% authentic.

If you buy the DVD Box Set, you get a LOT of extras which are well worth paying for, such as diaries, behind the scenes footage and interviews, bio's and a lot more, a whole discs worth, PLUS a documentary with the real men of Easy Company, the veterans who did it for real.

Anyways, this series is the closest any film has got so far to a fair, realistic AND moving portrayal of soldiers during WW2. There's no flag waving, the Germans are portrayed as real people, there are no Arnold Schwarzenegger like heroic charges, just damn good film making!

Summary: