Take cover! The Pacific is the new 10-part World War Two epic from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, a follow-up to their 2001 series Band of Brothers. It was commissioned by HBO, who will premiere it in the States on March 14, and comes to Sky Movies HD in the UK over Easter.
Shot in Australia at a cost of $200m, it follows the war across the Pacific theatre through the experiences of three US Marines, Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), and John Basilone (Jon Seda).
“There was a very strong, desaturated quality to Band of Brothers,” said Spielberg. “In The Pacific, it was blue skies.They weren’t fighting in overcast weather.
"Sometimes monsoons would come in and it was terribly rainy and muddy and you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face, but it was a blue-sky war. It was a hot, dry, humid blue-sky war. So, there are more vivid colors in The Pacific than we ever had in Band of Brothers because that was the way it was, when you read the books and talk to the survivors of those campaigns.”
Veterans of BoB, and prior to that Saving Private Ryan, can brace themselves for more of Spielberg’s gift for putting the visceral horrors of combat on the screen.
“I don’t want to compare one war to the other, in terms of savagery, but there’s a level when nature and humanity conspire against the individual,” he added. “To see what happens to those individuals, throughout the entire course of events, leading up to the dropping of the two atomic bombs, is something that was very, very hard for the actors, the writers and all of us to put on the screen, but we felt we had to try.”
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