band of brothers

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band of brothers to illustrate my point

02/08/2007

The HBO original series, ‘Band of Brothers’, is one of the best World War II productions I have ever seen. It was filmed with the same gut wrenching realism, attention to detail, and brutal honesty as the popular WWII movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’. In fact, the Band of Brothers series was produced by both Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, the director and star of the WWII movie. Many have considered the television series to be a sort of follow up to the movie, though I disagree; the series stands on its own, and in many ways reaches a depth far beyond the movie.

What you are about to read is the culmination of information from many different places and resources. I hope you enjoy it.

Band of Brothers follows a company of Army Rangers, ‘Easy Company’ of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division. Easy Company was involved in some of the most intense fighting witnessed by American troops during the Second World War, and the series follows their progress from training all the way to the end of the war. It takes viewers on a ride through the rigors of the elite training program the company faced, the all but completely suicidal jump they made into enemy lines the night before ‘D-Day’, the brutal conditions they faced in the Battle of the Bulge, and finally the jubilation they experienced at wars end make no bones about it.

The series doesn’t star any huge name actors, and thankfully so. Rather than focusing on glitz and glammer, like so many WWII movies do today (think ‘Pearl Harbor’), the makers of the series focused on good solid writing and accurate historical facts to represent what actually happened. Perhaps the most endearing part of the series is the fact that many of the survivors from the actual ‘Easy Company’ were involved in the production. Before every episode, there are a series of brief interviews with the veterans, and they describe elements of their experience that are relevant to the episode that is about to begin all in all.

As you become attached to the different characters, you even notice that they actually chose their actors to look just like the real people they represent. Though it doesn’t reveal who the veterans all are until the end of the series, you can pick many of them out based on the actors in the show turning now to another matter.

The 10 part series won 6 Emmy awards (it was nominated for 19), a Golden Globe award, and an American Film Institute award. I highly recommend the series to anyone that hasn’t seen it, even people that don’t normally like war movies will find this series hard to stop watching. Its realistic dialogue, strong emphasis on character development, and its beautiful cinematography make it a series anyone can enjoy to put it differently.