On Friday night, I went out and bought the Band of Brothers boxed set. All this, and I’d never actually seen a single episode of this show - I just figured I’d like it.
Well, it’s pretty good. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell what’s going on a lot of the time due to shaky cam, dark scenes, and my own general inattentiveness. It also reinterprets history a little bit in order to make it more dramatic. But it could reasonably be argued that all history we’re exposed to is itself just a version interpreted a certain way for a specific effect, so I’ll let that go.
The one thing that irks me is that there’s a lot of time in each episode where the director just gives some quiet time for you to reflect on the thoughts of a specific character while looking at their face. Unfortunately, the only two people that are really convincing during these moments are Donnie Wahlberg and Damian Lewis…it’s just dead time for every other character.
One thing I really like is that the whole series is politically pretty neutral except for a few jabs about the ineffectiveness of British forces. It seems that some movies try to paint the picture like the U.S. had this amazingly high price to pay - they totally gloss over the fact that Russia lost some 10 million troops. So yeah, it doesn’t have “America, Fuck Yeah” (AFY) syndrome…but I wonder how things would change if the series had been made now instead of 2000-2001.
