The Pacific

From this, you will gain a keen understanding of what lies beneath those endless rows of markers at any military cemetery. This is an honest and often magnificent tribute to the 1st Marine Division.

The Pacific is as brutally simple and direct--and as oblivious to modern PC sensibilities--as the Marine's letter. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, this 10-part HBO miniseries is a loving but anguished tribute to the men who fought on the bloody island hellholes that comprised World War II's Pacific theater.

Obvious or not, I watched most of the 10 episodes without the scene-setters and was occasionally lost. But if the battles aren't always distinctive, the characters are.

Ultimately, what a series like this aims to do is to pay homage to the marines who sacrificed their lives. The Pacific succeeds at that task, asking its audience to imagine what those battles must have been like from the ground level, and for that alone, it's worth watching. But The Pacific fails by trying to wrest big emotional moments from its already compelling narrative.

What the production most sorely lacks, though, is a strong sense of cohesion, which often makes the hours play more like loosely assembled snapshots of the war without a compelling hook to pull the audience along. Nor do any of the key performers really distinguish themselves, dwarfed as they are by the general sense of pageantry--the sound and fury--that usually surrounds them.