I was a huge fan of HBO's Band of Brothers. Taking Saving Private Ryan and turning it into a miniseries was genius. The show was a hit and HBO has found a way to give us more from the World War II genre. While in Band of Brothers we were fighting the Germans, The Pacific sets up the stage for the island conflicts the United States had with the Japanese.
The Pacific Trailer
The Pacific is a ten-hour miniseries is executive produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman, the creative team behind the Emmy®-winning 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.
The miniseries tracks the intertwined odysseys of three U.S. Marines - Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda) - across the vast canvas of the Pacific. The extraordinary experiences of these men and their fellow Marines take them from the first clash with the Japanese in the haunted jungles of Guadalcanal, through the impenetrable rain forests of Cape Gloucester, across the blasted coral strongholds of Peleliu, up the black sand terraces of Iwo Jima, through the killing fields of Okinawa, to the triumphant, yet uneasy, return home after V-J Day.
Check out the trailer below:
Carl Franklin (HBO's "Rome"), Jeremy Podeswa (HBO's "Six Feet Under"), Tony To (HBO's "Band of Brothers"), Tim Van Patten (HBO's "The Sopranos") and Graham Yost (HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon") will direct episodes.
The Pacific is based on the books "With the Old Breed," by Eugene Sledge, which was hailed by historian Paul Fussell as "one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war," and "Helmet for My Pillow," by Robert Leckie (recipient of the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Annual Award), as well as original interviews conducted by the filmmakers.