![]() Still, Generation Kill ?has a shaky, nervous intensity it feels as if you are in the Humvees with the Marines. Nearly the entire first episode depicts the bored Marines biding their time in Kuwait before war is declared. In classic Simon style, the narrative unfolds with a deliberate pace that will be familiar to Wire fans yet frustrate casual viewers. As might be expected, Generation Kill is violent, profane, and thoroughly engrossing. In seven one-hour episodes, Simon and Burns meticulously re-create journalist Evan Wright’s 2004 firsthand account of the Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion’s six-week march to Baghdad in 2003. That’s not surprising, considering that its executive producers and writers are David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative team behind the acclaimed and sorely missed series The Wire. Thankfully, the new hbo miniseries Generation Kill, which begins July 13, is neither squeamish nor ham-fisted. Director Brian De Palma’s Redacted tackled a real-life atrocity-the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers-but its combat scenes were ruined by its didactic approach. ![]() Both were oddly hesitant about depicting the actual war, skirting battlefield images in favor of making statements. In the Valley of Elah was a meandering whodunit about a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to find his son, an Army specialist who goes awol after coming back from Iraq. In Stop-Loss, an Army sergeant (Ryan Phillippe) returns from Iraq only to face an “involuntary extension” of his service. Another reason is the way they have awkwardly shoehorned political talking points into soldiers’ stories. ![]() Is it even possible to make a good movie about a war that’s still being fought? Americans’ battle fatigue only partly explains why Iraq films have flopped. But more than anything, I want them to write that it’s a good movie.” “If most critics use the word ‘Iraq’ in the opening sentence of their reviews, we’ll deal with it,” an executive at Lionsgate, the movie’s distributor, told the New York Times. ![]() The Lucky Ones, an upcoming film starring Tim Robbins as a recently returned vet, reportedly doesn’t include a single mention of the I-word. The few major Iraq-themed movies- Stop-Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted-have tanked at the box office, and the indifferent reaction to these heavy-handed attempts at relevance seems to have soured the industry on the idea of trying to bring Iraq to the screen. Five years into the war, there has yet to be a truly memorable or defining movie about the conflict. “We band of brothers.”Īmerica’s profound disconnect from the Iraq War has been nowhere more evident than in Hollywood. Surveying the nearly empty chat room, Ricks offered a self-mocking take on the quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V that had inspired the title of Stephen Ambrose’s book about World War II paratroopers and the popular hbo miniseries based on it. “Our little group of people who still care about the Iraq war appears to be dwindling,” Ricks wrote. On february 26, Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks logged on to an online chat to discuss the war in Iraq, only to find that the number of readers awaiting him had reached its lowest point since the war started. As such there are now multiple shows like Band of Brothers that both explore war with a budget usually reserved for feature films, but also match Band of Brothers' analysis of morality in wartime and the trauma that follows.Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. Boasting of a vast ensemble cast and some of the best filmmaking on television at the time, the ten-episode series was followed by many similar miniseries and dramas. Just like how the show's producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks' cinematic collaboration, Saving Private Ryan, revolutionized the genre of war drama, Band of Brothers set a high benchmark for similar dramas on TV.īand of Brothers changed television with the way that it showcased movie-sized production values with sweeping locations and intense battle sequences, bringing the budget and scope of a WW2 movie such as Saving Private Ryanto the small screen. HBO's Emmy-winning miniseries Band of Brothers is an expansive and enthralling World War II drama that documents the efforts of an American regiment (nicknamed 'Easy Company') and their experiences at war. Despite the epic scale and storytelling, there are shows like Band of Brothers that manage to touch on the qualities that made it so great.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |