AcePylut
Posts: 1494
Joined: 3/19/2004 Status: offline
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SPOILER ALERT: I wrote this on another forum, one not populated by WW2 Geeky Gamer Grogs like myself. ------------ I was a little disappointed in it. It seemed very rushed. I mean, "hey this guy wants to enter boot camp, oh wait, it's Aug 7th and we're invading Guadalcanar, oh wait, here's some obligatory combat, the end"... it was ok for me because I know the history of the Pac War like the back of my hand... but for the average viewer, I wonder if they were thinking "wait, the japs were kicking butt for 6 months, but now we're invading an island. Did ANYTHING happen in between, that might give us that hint of why we *could* go on the offensive... you know... a hint that 4 fleet carriers of the Kido Butai were now artificial reefs buried a couple hundred miles off a speck of an island? I was really disappointed in the firefight. That was the Battle of the Tenryu (wrongly named, but that's what it was called). 800 Japs rushed a sandbar over an evening, all were dead. It seemed like they are more interested in getting a couple of the "fine details" right (like the single strand of barb wire over the sandbar at the mouth of "alligator creek"), than making the battle "scary". They didn't call it alligator creek for nothing....I wanted to "hear" the crocodiles eating the dead soldiers in the middle of the night, like Leike said happened in his book. I really felt let down by that scene. Maybe because i had been waiting to see that specific action gets its due for a long long long time and wanted to see everything, dunno. This Pacific war was brutal in ways that the European war wasn't... and while I'm glad that they hinted at the brutalness of it (the patrol that was sliced and diced), I didn't get that feel of "no mercy" that was the Pacific War. They spent more time showing the US marines callously sniping at the Jap soldier and laughing, tormenting him, then they did "describing" the patrol (They were tied to a tree, tortured, hands cut off, penis's chopped off and shoved down their throats until the soldiers suffocated - the show could have mentioned this, so that the viewer had a better reason to understand of "why" the Marines went bloodthirsty). They hinted at the Marines being stranded (when they looked at the ocean and the fleet was gone) on the 'Canal, but not once did I get the sense that they were battling the elements as much as the enemy. Where was the relentless rain, misquitos, crocs in the river, snakes, malaria, jungle rot (hinted at), etc. etc. etc. I didn't feel that Guadalcanal was as miserable as was described in all the books I've read about it.
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