I'm looking forward to watching 'The Pacific' the same way as I did 'Band of Brothers' - on DVD, all the way through without interruption. I'll give my opinion then.
I noticed this comment early on in the thread: "I dont recall any movie/series/show about the PTO wherein any single Japanese soldier, airman or seaman was ever perceived as anything less than a machine." I presume you meant 'else than'? Well, I've seen Japanese soldiers and airmen portrayed as very human indeed. The first was the laconic guard in 'A Town Like Alice', who started out fierce and remote and ended up carrying sick children before collapsing ill himself; the scene where he died weeping over the tattered photo of his wife and children held out to him by Jean Paget (Virginia McKenna) is unforgettable. Likewise, that masterpiece 'Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence', which turned all the stereotypes on their heads and showed the complexity of the characters behind the masks on both sides. And the frustrated 'kamikaze kid' in 'Empire of the Sun' was certainly no 'machine'. Neither were many of the characters in 'Letters from Iwo Jima'.
Born in 1953, I spent several years of my childhood in Singapore, where I learnt about the Japanese occupation from people who'd been through it. World War Two history loomed large in those days. I remember playing 'English versus Jerries' in the school playground back in England - and that nobody else seemed to want to play 'versus Japanese'. Perhaps that was because quite a few of my playmates were the children of men who'd suffered in POW hell-camps like Changi and the Kwai, and I know now that there was a powerful racist element too, who saw all Japanese as 'slant-eyed monsters', whereas 'the Germans were quite like us really'.
No, we're all just people and we all care, fight, cry and make love much the same - and kick the hell out of each other when we lose reason and resort to violence as a poor substitute for good sense. Which that fine officer Richard Winters understood, when he promised to live the rest of his life in peace if he survived D-Day and the day after.
