Band of Brothers vs Generation Kill vs The Pacific

[Foley]

So which of the classic HBO war miniseries is the best one for you? I would guess that BoB will take the cake here, but there are good merits to each of them.

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

Generation Kill has the best dialogue in my opinion, mainly because the events were more recent than Band of Brothers or the Pacific were to World War II, so they could actually gauge how they would've talked with one another. All three are great, but Generation Kill's my favorite.

 

[Preacher ✝]

Hard to beat Band of Brothers, but there is another one that most people don't know about because its not HBO.

Generation War is like Band of Brothers but from the German side.



Here's a clip.

EDIT: Torrent Links Small | Medium | Large

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

Generation Kill has the best dialogue in my opinion

Even the radio traffic over the credits is on point

 

[Jewthulhu]

I've only watched Generation Kill so far, mainly because I like contemporary history more than WWII.

 

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

Nothing tops the end of Band of Brothers where you see all of those characters you followed were real and that they are old men now(back when it came out) and they start crying about the guys in their unit that died.

 

[Breadbassket]

Gotta go with Band of Brothers, The Pacific is good to but will always be in the shadow of Band of Brothers and Generation Kill is well produced and acted but it feels more like a road trip with violence.

 

[WinchesterWhiskey]

I like all of them for separate reasons, and I think they're all amazing in their own right. Unrelated, having read Masters of the Air, then watching the miniseries, it felt lacking at certain points.

The Pacific is good in showing how brutal the fighting against the IJA/IJN really was while hammering home the point that everyone involved in the story is a walking husk by the end of it. Band of Brothers is great in that it represents the unit cohesiveness from training onward while also painting the troops as people on both sides, with the German monologue at the end really cementing how both sides suffered.

Generation Kill shows the Superbad aspects of OIF while also showing how things look from the ground up. I like all of them, honestly.

 

[millais]

I liked The Pacific, since I enjoyed reading Eugene Sledge's famous memoirs "With the Old Breed" and "China Marine", but it's obviously narratively flawed in trying to combine 3 different narratives/memoirs that never intersect.

 

[TheHarbinger]

Nothing tops the end of Band of Brothers where you see all of those characters you followed were real and that they are old men now(back when it came out) and they start crying about the guys in their unit that died.

The people were real (for the most part). But the actual stories are very factually wrong. These guys were going off of their old memories and war stories and the lies of Stephen Ambrose. And almost nothing was fact checked whatsoever. Some of it is a whitewash of what really happened, but some if it is just wrong for no reason other than they just made things up rather than check the actual records. Some of the families sued the Band of Brother book author, and won, but HBO refused to change the show on the DVDs or Blurays and admit that anything was wrong where things were incorrect.

After Stephen Ambrose was continually sued people started looking into all of his works and found that he plagiarized a lot. But he also completely fabricated his entire relationship with Dwight Eisenhower when he wrote his biography. Guy was a fraud basically and a mentally ill journalist. Band of Brothers is one of those shows and books that people romanticize but it really is a poorly done work of mostly fabricated accounts. People will swear by its historical accuracy and get emotionally upset when you show them that most of the stories never really happened.

The author of Generation Kill recently killed himself. Evan Wright. After his book was published lots of Marines were punished and basically had their careers ruined because they were quoted criticizing high up officers or politicians. Most of them probably didn't think that his articles would lead to one of the biggest television series of all time on HBO and become legendary in the Marine community. And that practically everyone would know about their time in Force Recon during OIF.

The Pacific is a great series but suffers from being unfocused. Hard to reduce WWII's Pacific front into ten hours of content obviously. It probably would have been better to just focus on one single Marine or on one group of men in the same unit or adjacent units.

 

[guidmaker]

The people were real (for the most part). But the actual stories are very factually wrong. These guys were going off of their old memories and war stories and the lies of Stephen Ambrose. And almost nothing was fact checked whatsoever. Some of it is a whitewash of what really happened, but some if it is just wrong for no reason other than they just made things up rather than check the actual records. Some of the families sued the Band of Brother book author, and won, but HBO refused to change the show on the DVDs or Blurays and admit that anything was wrong where things were incorrect.

You're massively exaggerating the inaccuracies. So they never jumped on D-Day, participated in Market Garden, and defended Bastogne? There's a gray area in historical drama that you're painting jet black as if it was all bullshit.

e: I actually just finished reading David Kenyon Webster's memoir, portrayed by actor Eion Bailey, and much of it is damn close to the TV series.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Tour of Duty smokes all of those shows.