News > 'The Pacific' Set To Film In Aussie-Land
April 10, 2007
Via: Coming Soon
Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's massive new WWII project "The Pacific" looks to be filming in Australia. The ten-part mini-series is going to be a huge undertaking, employing nearly 280 Aussie actors, and costing somewhere in the 150 million dollar range. The project will do for the Pacific campaign, what "Band of Brothers" did for the European campaign.
I can't say that I was a huge fan of "Band of Brothers" as I thought that it sort of canonized Easy Company, but it was a well-made, well-acted series and was hugely popular with just about everyone but me. I worry that a retelling of the Pacific campaign might fall in to a similar trap and this would be far more detrimental to a historical retelling. The Pacific campaign, fought on a series of tiny atolls, peninsulas, and island groups across the Pacific, was a brutal war of attrition that ended many a soldier's lives and gave a sort of ominous idea of what feature wars in the area would play out like. The series needs to be brutal and show what men did to survive amongst the harsh conditions and dangerous situations the campaign was laden with. So here's hoping that they stay far away from Steven Ambrose's sentimental schlock story telling, as it completely turned me off from the original "Band of Brothers" book.
Writer Bruce McKenna, a main writer on the first series, will be taking the reigns here, with many of the "Band of Brothers" crew coming back. HBO and Dreamworks will produce the show.
