The Pacific, being screened at the moment on Sky and produced by, among others, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, is from the same stable as Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and a thousand other World War II movies before that. Anyone who, like me, has been watching such stuff since being knee-high to an entity possessed of knees, will have had no trouble recognizing the genre to which it belongs and the familiar themes and typical incidents and moves and characters. And, watching the first two episodes last week, I indeed had none. They were OK with me; I was absorbed by them. I'll be there again, in front of the set, tonight and for the rest of the series unless it should take a dive of some sort.
But A.A. Gill reports a much less happy experience: clichés; 'as familiar as your own sock drawer'; 'as cosy as a remake of HMS Pinafore'; and so forth. Well, one man's cricket is another man's golf (as the saying goes), and so I will not try to press upon you my reaction in preference to Gill's. You can make up your own mind if you're interested in doing so. You'll find another view here, from Andrew Anthony.
What I'll pursue, instead, is the burden A.A. Gill lays upon The Pacific and its makers, and in the light of which he judges the series to be 'morally reprehensible', no less. This is the burden of responsibility for other wars than the one it purports to represent, and for blameworthy actions in these wars to boot. Gill writes:
Film and television don't happen in a vacuum or without consequences. How young men react to conflict is in part dictated by what they already know, and what they know comes from the fiction they've seen.
So Spielberg, Hanks and co should have made their series in the light of Afghanistan and Iraq, should they? Or perhaps what was needed was an anti-war series about the war in the Pacific. 'What is the point', Gill asks, 'of making a war film if you have nothing germane or pressing to say about war?'
I beg to suggest that he may have missed a certain point. At the end of episode 2 some of the men who have survived the battle at Guadalcanal are told, by a guy serving them coffee on the ship, that back home they are regarded as heroes. Heroes. It's a moving scene; or, at any rate, I was moved by it. Is Gill not OK with the idea that there was a degree of heroism from the men who fought to defeat Japanese fascism and German Nazism? Of course, he doesn't have to be OK with it, but if he isn't, he could try something weaker. He could try this: is it at least OK by him that they did fight, heroically or otherwise, to defeat Japanese fascism and German Nazism, many of them giving their lives in the process, others going through terrible hardships? Whether it's OK with him or not, there are plenty of people for whom it is OK and a lot more than OK, and who won't necessarily be watching The Pacific under the influence of one of today's smelly little orthodoxies.