Film Review

In 1992, Stephen Ambrose published Band of Brothers, a highly readable volume of World War II microhistory: an account of the career of E for Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army, from training in Georgia in 1942 through its role in D-Day, to the end of the war, when members captured Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" in Berchtesgarden. The narrative included an anecdote about a certain Private Fritz Niland, who was removed from combat shortly after D-day because he had lost three brothers in action. The story became the nucleus around which Stephen Spielberg created his swirling pyrotechnic war fable, Saving Private Ryan (1998). The success of that film, and Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation (1998) revealed a massive popular interest in the World War II era, hence preparing the way for a wave of World War II projects including, by a neat circularity a ten-part miniseries adaptation of Band of Brothers for HBO.	1
The series was the brain child of the star and director of Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg, who share the credit as producers; Hanks also cowrote one episode and directed another. The result is stunning. In terms of historical verisimilitude, Band of Brothers far surpasses Saving Private Ryan, and it represents one of the great dramatic achievements of the medium of television to date.	2
Band of Brothers has two major advantages over other recent filmic treatments of World War II. First, it has the space to explore complex issues, including aspects of the war that many filmmakers have preferred to dodge, such as the shooting of prisoners in cold blood, errors at all levels of command, death from friendly fire, looting, mental breakdowns, and alcoholism. Second, Band of Brothers is based on a historical account, and its scripts were developed in consultation not only with Ambrose but also with survivors of Easy Company. The link to reality is emphasized by the style of the series, and above all by opening each episode with original members of Easy Company recalling to camera the events to be depicted.	3
For all the historical references and authentic style in films like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor (2001), their source texts are, at heart, not historical but cinematic: the fondly remembered films of the 1940s. The new wave of World War II films have primarily been genre pieces intended to apply the new technology of CGI to a familiar territory in exactly the same was as it was used in Titanic (1997) or Gladiator (2000). Not so Band of Brothers. Successive episodes repeatedly avoid the hackneyed conventions of the war-film genre. Characters emerge from the narrative gradually rather than through the expected generic events or conversations. There are no exaggerated regional politics in the make-up of the company, no soliloquizing in letters home, and few moments of convenient narrative closure. The result creates the welcome sensation of events speaking for themselves, without a scriptwriter's heavy-handed moralizing, propagandizing, or sentimentality.	. . .