Series Review: Band of Brothers (HBO)
September 2001 TV series on the Second World War
Band of Brothers, the 10-part HBO series, debuted days before Black Tuesday in 2001. Looking back—I watched it for the first time last week—what’s best about Band of Brothers is a somber tone and reverence for the dead, maimed and walking wounded. The pre-steaming cable TV series of stories about young Americans bonding during the Allied invasion of Europe during what’s become known as the Second World War shows the horror of war. It’s especially relevant as America seems to be careening toward sending young Americans to fight yet another war in Europe.
Based on Stephen Ambrose’s bestselling 1992 book (which excerpted soldier accounts including diaries), created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and written by Erik Jendresen, John Orloff and Hanks, among others, Band of Brothers is thoroughly modern in the worst sense. HBO’s BBC-co-funded series is naturalistic. It’s like watching a hybrid of a documentary and a slice of life series. It’s non-philosophical and, in stretches, it is explicitly anti-intellectual. Band of Brothers depicts the U.S. Army’s Easy Company (2nd Battalion, 506th parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division). The series and book title derives from William Shakespeare’s Henry V, a play in which England’s king gives a speech before a battle.
David Schwimmer, Damian Lewis and other principal actors in the cast are good. Battle scenes are brutal, grisly and explicit. The musical score is poorly integrated, overwhelming and loud. Characters—all based on real U.S. soldiers—get downsized in the jerky camera styled action, though some stand out. Episodes have a cumulative effect, marking the impact of America’s involvement in World War 2 in scenes—the look on a Dutch girl’s face—an officer pledging safety to a superior officer before being shot by a Nazi in ricochet—a soldier’s tenderness when a comrade’s lost a limb—a subplot between a medic and a nurse—and Band of Brothers can be poignant.
Flaws abound. Besides a lack of thematic storytelling, loud music and aversion to—or evasion of—philosophy, the historical meaning of each battle, i.e., the slaughter at Normandy’s beaches, the Battle of the Bulge, Market Garden—is minimized or ignored. Neal McDonough overacts. Conversely, the character portrayed by Damian Lewis draws attention because he’s the most serious, though he’s also as inscrutable by the end as he is at the beginning. Band of Brothers has no ideas on war—it shows war as awful, which is not an idea—let alone ideas on the roots of war or cause of this war. It is bereft. Band of Brothers in spots is too Hollywood. You notice staging, sets and lighting. As gruesome as battle scenes can be, bodies occasionally fall in stunt man style.
Several episodes’ real-life, present-day soldier remembrances are good—it’s best to look into the men’s eyes as they recall the war—and the omission of the men’s names is gimmicky and unfortunate. Band of Brothers withholds the names until the last episode, which trivializes their lives, as if the audience will lose interest in men’s stories if they can anticipate in advance which men may die during war. In the sixth episode, blood and boot prints in the snow mark the end of a climax in the series. It’s a powerful ending to a horrific battle which dramatizes the looming sadness of everything in war—heightened by the crunch of snow beneath men’s boots, slowly falling snowflakes and the fog and stillness of the woods in the aftermath of mass death.
Then comes another historical and philosophical flaw—a dig at General George Patton, who essentially won the war in Europe for America—before Band of Brothers peters out in Germany, where the men take the Nazis’ Eagle’s Nest. In its own kind of horror, echoing and previewing the equivocation and moral grayness of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Munich, Band of Brothers monstrously depicts a Nazi officer addressing his troops to provide the series with its most serious thematic meaning—granting a moral equivalency to Nazis—underscoring the whole series’ primary flaw: the refusal to judge what happened, including America’s involvement, and why. Parts of Band of Brothers embroider the deepest sense of fear, nothingness and loss.
The series ends on a soldier’s recollection; he praises others for heroism, denying his own heroism, in a glaring contradiction. It is glaring because his words are simple, pained and clear. It’s a contradiction because if they were heroes, so is he—or, perhaps more truthfully and penetratingly (particularly as America’s pushed toward waging another war over a tyrant’s invasion), because if the soldier’s not, in fact, a hero, neither are his band of brothers. Which means they died for nothing. Which means it was mass death as sacrifice. It’s a natural and telling moment in the 2001 series, which debuted hours before the worst attack on America’s mainland—thus far—catapulting the nation into a war which remains undeclared, unacknowledged and, chillingly, is being lost even as our military defense is being destroyed.
