BAND OF BROTHERS – 8.1 / 10

Every war has certain elements, plotlines and characters that are nearly universally depicted in the various films, books and television shows about that conflict. After a while, these specific traits begin to take hold of our collective consciousness such that the mere mention of a particular war evokes a certain set of images and characteristics for the audience whether or not they were alive during the time of that conflict. The Vietnam War, for instance, conjures images of draftees, soaked by unending rainstorms, out of their minds on hash, lost in an unforgiving jungle wilderness where the rules no longer apply. World War I evokes images of men huddled in the cold damp mud of the trenches forced to summon the courage to mount the walls and attack the enemy in a futile charge that is sure to take the lives of at least half their number for no discernible gain in territory.

World War II, of course, is no different. But what separates Band of Brothers from other depictions of WWII on film is not that it portrays the war in a way that’s all that different from what we’ve seen countless times before but rather that, because it’s based entirely on the recollections of men who were actually there and goes out of its way to be as historically accurate as possible, it breathes new life into some of the more hoary clichés of the World War II film. Even though we’ve seen the gung ho private hell bent on bringing a German Luger back to the States for his younger brother or the reluctant hero whose quiet strength is ideally suited to leading men into combat, Band of Brothers manages to evoke these clichés in a way that rings truer than most similar films, even ones lauded for their realism such as Saving Private Ryan.

Some of that, of course, is borrowed pathos. World War II so fundamentally shaped twentieth century American life that any audience sitting down to watch this miniseries brings with it at least a cursory understanding of why this war was fought and the toll it took both at home and abroad. For instance, the viewer knows, even if the soldiers don’t yet, that while they were landing at Normandy the Germans were busy trying to exterminate an entire race of people. The viewer knows that the eventual loss of life due to this war was staggeringly high, reaching well into the tens of millions. And that the toll this conflict took on anyone who lived through it, whether they fought in the war or not, was felt for years to come, such that it shaped the character of two generations of the population of the entire world and was the defining moment of the last century. With that sort of backdrop always present somewhere in the back of the audience’s mind, the events of the Band of Brothers miniseries take on an emotional weight that they almost certainly would not otherwise have.

That added pathos, together with the fact that the events depicted on screen are as close to real as they could possibly be (a fact that is cleverly evoked by having the men upon whom these characters were based interviewed at the beginning of each installment), creates in the audience the sense not that they’re watching some filmmaker’s idea of what the war was like but rather that they’re watching the actual war. Because of that, the characters and events of the film become real in way that no other war film can even come close to. The virtuoso D-Day sequence that opens Saving Private Ryan, for instance, might get as close to the experience of war as cinema is capable; but the emotional impact of that admittedly powerful sequence pales in comparison to watching two beloved characters blown in half by artillery fire seven episodes into Band of Brothers.

The emotional impact of the deaths and catastrophic injuries in Band of Brothers owes its weight to a number of factors. Knowing that these men were real and that this really happened is a big part of it. Having been with them through training and D-Day and countless skirmishes and night patrols is part of it. And listening to the men who actually knew and were friends with the soldiers who died is part of it as well. Taken together, these elements add up to an emotional impact far beyond what's usually possible in a war movie. To even attempt to conceive of what that must have been like to live through is almost impossible. And yet these men managed to continue to fight, to pick up and move on despite such debilitating loss.

It’s commonplace to call the soldiers of World War II heroes. Tom Brokaw wrote a book calling them The Greatest Generation, an appellation that has since entered common usage as a way of describing anyone over the age of eighty. Predictably, of course, they all shirk that label, saying instead that though they served in the company of heroes, they themselves were not. To me, the real heroism on display here is not that these were mostly uneducated men— boys, really— who knew little of the world or what was in store for them but chose to go anyway. That’s courageous, of course, but can also be chalked up to a sense of honor or duty, or even just plain naïveté. What I find heroic about these men is that they kept on going. Seeing what they saw on D-Day, they still managed to fight on through France and into Holland, where they suffered unimaginable loss during the long winter in Bastogne. And still they kept on and continued into Germany and then Austria. It’s hard not to imagine giving up and packing it in after even one of those experiences. Hell, even one single day of what they saw would be enough to make anyone want to head for home. But they didn’t. Surrounded and all but engulfed by pain and fear, they kept on.

If there’s one thing that stands out at the end of Band of Brothers it’s the immeasurable sense of loss hanging over these men. More than just the lost friends and fellow soldiers, more than just the loss of innocence, there’s the very real sense that, by the end of 1945, these men had lost something ineffable about being human that they would never quite be able to recover. Though obviously none of us can know what it was like for these men, it certainly appears that much of their idealism died on the battlefields of Europe. Seeing what they saw, the pain and death, the horrible torture one group of people inflicted upon another and the way that a whole country stood by and watched it happen, they lost their faith in mankind. With that faith gone, all they had was each other.

At the close of the tenth and last episode of the miniseries, a voiceover describes the lives of each of the surviving members of Easy Company after they returned home. To a one they lived simple, modest lives, lives that today, in our celebrity obsessed, everyone is special and important culture, might be looked down upon as being normal, ordinary and, well, boring. But maybe those men learned something on the beaches of Normandy and the forests of Bastogne that only the experience of war can teach. When death closes in all around you and is ever present just over the next hill, all you really have to hang on to are the relationships you have with those closest to you. Maybe what you do isn’t nearly as important as how you do it and who you do it with. Maybe that’s the lesson these men took away from the war. It might have cost them their innocence, their youth, their idealism and their faith in their fellow man, but it certainly gave them a clear idea of what was important. It’s a lesson probably unknowable to those who were never there, but the fact that Band of Brothers drives that point home is what elevates it above other films of its kind. There might be nothing in the miniseries we haven’t seen before, but nothing before it has made that point so clearly and so forcefully.