WhatzUp

Band of Brothers
by Derek Neff

I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I was forced to wait until the release of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers on video and DVD before I could see what all the fuss was about. Band of Brothers was aired in 10 one-hour installments on the cable channel earlier this year, and it has now been released as six separate tapes on VHS/DVD (each containing two episodes, the sixth containing all bonus material.)

As of this writing, I have only seen the first tape, containing the first two episodes, and I can’t wait to see the rest. Not only is what I have seen so far unusually good by the standards we usually assign made-for-TV movies, it is unusually good by any standards, rivaling even Saving Private Ryan for its cinematic brilliance, its visceral intensity, and its sense of humanity.

Band of Brothers concerns the travails and victories of one army paratrooper unit, Easy Company, through the latter part of World War II. The first episode, “Currahee,” introduces us to several of the soldiers and officers in Easy Company at an Army training camp in Toccoa, GA. Led by the tyrannical Lt. Sobel (David Schwimmer, who plays Ross on “Friends”), Easy Company is honed into one of the most effective fighting units that Sobel’s superiors have ever seen. Unfortunately, though Lt. Sobel does an effective job of training his men, he is obviously not cut out for actual combat, and in one military training exercise after another his rash decisions, made in panic and excessive pride, lead his men into what would be certain death in real-life battle. But how does the unit protest against this incompetent leadership, when to do so is tantamount to mutiny, punishable by death?

“Currahee” has all the drama and tension of The Caine Mutiny but without the actual mutiny. As portrayed here, the behavior of the officers in the U.S. Army is as reserved, rigid, and politically subtle as the behavior of the characters in a Henry James novel. I was riveted.

“Currahee,” for all its drama, has no battle sequences, so that when we see Easy Company finally deployed by parachute somewhere over Normandy on D-Day in the second episode, “Day of Days,” the intensity of the battle is all that much more jarring. (It also helps that we have come to know and care about most of the main players by now, especially the stoic and admirable Lt. Winters, played by Damian Lewis.) The D-Day paratrooping sequence is incredibly disturbing, and cinematically it’s every bit as impressive as the famous opening sequence in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. (Band of Brothers was co-produced by Spielberg and Tom Hanks, in association with HBO.) The next hour is spent almost entirely in battle, and by the end of Episode 2 we feel exhausted, but also exhilarated, as all great filmmaking makes us feel, no matter how serious the subject matter. If the other eight episodes are as good as these first two — and I have no reason to believe they aren’t— Band of Brothers is a masterpiece of massive proportions.