Questions and Answers: Which is better, 'Band of Brothers' or 'The Pacific'?

The Pacific is what I like to call a “cinematic bookend” to the Emmy Award-winning 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. It’s not a sequel because it doesn’t follow Army soldiers in the European Theater of Operations. It’s more of a “companion series” because it’s about three Marines (John Basilone, Robert Leckie, and Eugene Sledge) and their experiences in the war against Japan.

Because Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman teamed up with most of the writers, producers, and directors of Band of Brothers, the 2010 miniseries was not made to compete with the earlier show. It was made in part to address Pacific War veterans’ concerns that Hanks and Spielberg focused on the ETO twice in less than three years (Saving Private Ryan was released in 1998) and that their story wasn’t being told. (This, too, was a complaint that the late Stephen Ambrose received after he wrote a series of books about the war in Europe. He was about to work on a book about the war in the Pacific with his son Hugh, but he died of lung cancer in 2002. Hugh wrote the companion book to The Pacific, which was published shortly before the miniseries premiered in March of 2010.)

Is The Pacific better than Band of Brothers? The answer to that is: It depends on each viewer’s particular tastes. For instance, in Band of Brothers the paratroopers’ personal lives outside of the barracks or beyond the battlefield are not explored. We don’t know if any of the Easy Company men date girls in Toccoa or in England. The only references to romance are Harry Welsh’s plans to send his parachute back to Britain so that his British war bride can use the silk to make her wedding dress. That, Doc Roe’s sweet friendship with a Belgian nurse in “Bastogne” and a quick sex scene between a paratrooper and a sexy German girl, is it for romance in Band of Brothers.

In The Pacific, both John Basilone and Robert Leckie have romances. Basilone (John Seda) meets Sgt. Lena Riggi at a Marine Corps base in California while on assignment as a drill instructor, and “Lucky” Leckie (James Badge Dale) falls in love twice (with Vera in New Jersey and a Greek-Australian girl while the Marines are in Sidney). In these love stories there is some angst-filled wartime romance spiced up with a little nudity. (Hey, it is HBO!)

So, if you like seeing the home front or wartime liaisons, The Pacific is better than Band of Brothers in that regard.

Is the narrative structure of The Pacific better than that of Band of Brothers? It’s different, that’s for sure. In BoB we follow a cohesive unit from basic training to the end of the war in Europe. In The Pacific, the three main characters are not in the same places all the time. Eugene Sledge, for instance, doesn’t get into the Marines till 1943, while Leckie and Basilone are on Guadalcanal around the same time, but in different units.

Also, the war in the Pacific was different from that in Western Europe. The islands and coral atolls we see in The Pacific seem as though they are on a different planet from England, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Austria. There aren’t any big towns or villages in The Pacific’s battlefields…but there are alien-looking jungles, coral and sand beaches, and even volcanic ashy beaches. And the war fighting on those islands was more brutal and savage than anything we saw on Band of Brothers.

My opinion? The Pacific is not necessarily better. It is different.