Not medieval alert: I’m off to a screening today of the first two episodes of ‘The Pacific’. This is the Hanks/Spielberg follow-up to the peerless ‘Band of Brothers’, which followed Easy Company, (part of the American 101st Airborne Division ) from the Normandy landings in June 1944 to the fall of Berlin. I confess I am unnaturally excited. The Pacific shifts the story to the eastern theatre. This part of the war doesn’t get taught or talked about half as much as events in Europe, perhaps because conditions were even more dreadful, the fighting perhaps more barbaric and the human cruelty at least as grotesque. Will this translate into good television? Spielberg, Hanks and HBO have form, so I suspect it will. Will it be easy viewing? I doubt it.
Here’s the trailer:
