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The good: - as the everyone else say, the combat scenes - the attention to detail on the planes The bad: - Feels like Austin Butler is acting like a pilot in those 1940s movies about the flying fortresses instead of a pilot of a flying fortress - Characters are not only super thin, but miss the depth and variety of BoB.
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Jan 27, 2024 09:44
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Reading around the reviews online, I think Allan Sepinwall is the take that is closest to mine. The thing he says about you being able to describe every character in a single sentence is true.
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Jan 27, 2024 22:53
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Stegosnaurlax posted:BoB was no different two episodes in. Most of the characters had barely had a word said other than banter. That's not true at all. Hell, you barely see Sobel the rest of the series and you already have a very strong idea of who he is. You may not know all characters but you have a strong sense of a few. George Luz, Bill Guarnere, Winters, Sobel and Speirs have well defined characteristics by the end of 2.
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Jan 27, 2024 23:30
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I think its less not having the original people, and more that apple probably wanted to play it safer than hbo. A lot of the characterization in both BoB and Pacific was less than flattering.
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Jan 28, 2024 04:17
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I don't think apple's playing it safe just for the sake of preserving people's memory. The Pacific pretty much portrayed all its main characters in a very positive light. But they still had "problematic" traits or things that would be controversial as part of their traits. Leckie is insubordinate and with his friends steals some comfort items from the army. Some are bloodthirsty wanting to kill "japs." In BoB, Guarnere is showing as a bit of an insubordinate jerk to Winters until Winters wins his respect. You don't have to make someone out to be a Sobel/LT Dike/ Pvt Peck to give them some flavor beyond "perfectly galant, perfectly disciplined, perfectly charismatic."
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Jan 28, 2024 17:19
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In terms of WW2 TV shows, if anyone is trying to scratch that itch, I'd check out World on Fire. A tad too melodramatic at times, and certainly not the best visual effects, but it does tell a decent story.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:28
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Indeed, much better episode. Only minor gripe is their continued need to make Austin Butler's character someone out of an old school propaganda movie. Like, maybe instead of 4 scenes of the co-pilot freaking out only to be reassured by the awesomeness of Austin Butler, we could have done with 2. But still, a pretty minor thing.
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Feb 2, 2024 10:02
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Also, I wish that the remaster of the old b-17 game that they are doing wasn't so buggy and glitchy (according to the reviews), because this episode gave me a real hankering for some old b-17 microprose gaming.
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Feb 2, 2024 17:47
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Oasx posted:Why could the bombers we saw take off in the fog, but the other bombers couldn't? It seemed like it screwed up the whole operation. Communications between planes required the radio operator to swap the pilot's intercom to the radio, and communicating internally was a different system than externally. One of the crew members was specifically a radio operator. You can imagine that in the middle of a situation where you need to bail out informing the other planes wasn't high priority. Sure, sometimes they'd announce it, but most of the time there was no time. Bulky Bartokomous posted:I read an interesting interview with an enlisted dude from Easy Company who was field commissioned and became an officer in another company and he said a lot of the stuff in BoB (the book and the movie) was either greatly exaggerated or flat out made up (Speirs running through the German lines in the attack on Foy). He pretty much said there was clique in E Co. and the story was told entirely from their PoV. There was only sentence about him in the whole book and from what I recall it was Winters' opinion that he had watched too many war movies and swore too much. Lot's of things were dramatized or made up in band of brothers. The 12th armored found the Kaufering concentration camp, the 101st didn't get there till the next day, and they found almost entirely corpses because the SS burned down the barracks with those too sick to move. Other stuff was changed to preserve the images of the Americans. The nurse that plays a large part in the battle of the bulge episode in reality was black (her mother was congolese) and survived. She was portrayed as white probably because part of the whole thing was that black nurses were not supposed to treat white soldiers. Phenotype posted:I don't understand why they did this, though. I mean, you've planned this massive air attack, oh gently caress the majority of them can't get off the ground today... isn't that an easy choice to postpone the mission? I don't understand why the idea of sending only 1/3 of the planes was even on the table. They did eventually get off the ground. And its important to note that from the side that took off on schedule what the other wings did didn't matter. The real world history of this is as follows: The raid was planned for August 7th. Weather kept delaying the mission. On August 17th it was set to go off. The plan was for the Regensburg strike force (the ones we see on screen) to take off and hit Regensburg before heading to Africa. The Schweinfurt group would take off 30 minutes later, and they would be the ones benefiting from the Regensburg group drawing all the attention of the Luftwaffe. In other words, not delaying the first group made no difference to them. It would not have been any less bloody for them to wait, since their whole point was drawing the attention of the luftwaffe. The other thing that wasn't really mentioned in the show but is in the books that cover the raid is that the group heading to Africa couldn't wait too long. The mission was timed so that they'd get to Africa with still some daylight left. It's possible to find yourself easily over Britain at night. Much less so over North Africa. So 3rd wing takes off using instruments, knowing that any delays would mean trying to find an unfamiliar airfield at night in the desert. 1st wing is supposed to take off 30 minutes later, but they don't. It's not as if youre gonna recall the 3rd wing who at the time was already in formation and on their way. 1st wing decides to delay. They end up going, but hours later, so they don't get the same benefit from the luftwaffe being grounded and refueling. joepinetree fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Feb 3, 2024 |
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Feb 3, 2024 21:59
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Flikken posted:Das Boot tv series. Check it out Das boot TV series has a very good first season, but a god awful second season. Never watched seasons 3 and 4 later, are those good?
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Feb 4, 2024 20:11
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Monica Bellucci posted:There was one season as it was a mini-series, 6 episodes. Unless this is a  - there was an 1981 movie that was shown as a series by the bbc, but was just one long 3 hour movie - there was a 2018 series with 4 seasons. Season 1 is good. Season 2 is absolute trash: a u-boat captain in NY ends up giving up on nazism and on going back to Germany because he falls in love with a black jazz singer. Never watched season 3 and 4 after that.
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Feb 4, 2024 21:13
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Pretty sure you got it backwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Bootquote:1981 unreleased version (209 minutes)
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Feb 4, 2024 21:37
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And just to be clear, i wasnt trying to be pedantic. Just making sure people don't confuse the excellent original version, be it in series or movie format, with the new series version, which is not at all excellent.
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Feb 4, 2024 23:47
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Bulky Bartokomous posted:I remember in my hayday of 90s flight sims (SWOTL will always be #1 in my heart) reading in PC gamer about dudes that played the Das Boot PC game in real-time. They'd do like 3-day long patrols and take naps during it, so these run times aren't a surprise to me at all. Oh, man, so many hours reading the companion manual to SWOTL. I had them all, Their finest hour, SWOTL, Battlehawls 1942, microprose's B-17 Flying Fortress (both 1992 and 2000 version), Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, il-2. It's why ive been paying attention to the b17 remaster, though from reviews it looks like a messy cash grab. On the sub front, people still do it with the silent hunter series, playing it in real time. SH3 probably my favorite, especially with GWX3 Gold. Too bad it was a glitchy, unstable mess. But they hard coded real convoys and historical missions. Nothing like doing your little u-boat patrol in the mediterranean and suddenly seeing a billion ships because you've just run into the invasion of sicilly.
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Feb 5, 2024 01:26
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On the flipside, it was very common for many bombers to claim credit for the same fighter because of how the formation was organized. It might have even been the SWOTL companion that talked of a mission where several b17s claimed to have downed a fighter and after the war cross referencing the combat records only 1 had been downed.
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Feb 5, 2024 06:38
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Jerusalem posted:It took me way too long to figure out what (of several things) was bothering me about Buck and I finally grasped that it's because he reminds me of Val Kilmer in Top Secret, and it makes it near impossible for me to take any of his scenes seriously. It's particularly jarring because just before they land you have the whole dialog with Crosby where they present the "land at the beach or go for the airfield" as a "fork in the road," where if they keep going and there's no air field its essentially hills and no real spot to land. Meanwhile, Buck's all "we're 150 gallons of fuel short, ditch some things and we're going for it" and that is presented as him being cool.
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Feb 5, 2024 08:14
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The Austin Butler thing wouldn't have bothered me if we didn't have like 4 versions of him being the only competent and dedicated one in his plane "were done for we need to bail out" no "we gotta ditch" no "we don't have fuel" ditch some weight "we gotta put our landing gear down" not yet It's not a fatal flaw, but it does stand out in comparison to the exchanges and discussion in the crosby plane, for example.
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Feb 5, 2024 18:45
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Honestly, this wouldn't have been a bad episode if it hadn't come after last week. It's BoB and pacific did their character development episodes early on, rather than halfway through.
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Feb 9, 2024 06:34
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Cojawfee posted:I guess I'd get blasted then because they had us write the date as DD Mon YYYY when I was in the air force. Do you use military time outside of military settings? I am going to guess no. Phenotype posted:Okay, this is one area where I have to go to bat for American exceptionalism. MM/DD/YYYY makes more sense. There is a lot of intrinisic information that's conveyed in knowing the month that you don't get if you're putting the day up front. If it's May 5th, then you can glance down and see 05/DD/YYYY and immediately know it's happening in the next few weeks. If you see 12/DD/YYYY, you know that it's not gonna happen for a while, and that you'll probably want to wear a coat. Whereas if you're seeing the day first, then you don't have any useful information unless you keep reading -- you'll see 05/MM/YYYY and won't be sure if it's happening today or not. all i can say is lol.
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Feb 9, 2024 17:28
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There is also an issue of overclaiming kills. It's not as if there was a way to separate who was shooting at whom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweinfurt%E2%80%93Regensburg_mission#Results_and_losses quote:Spitfire pilots claimed 13 German fighters shot down and P-47 pilots claimed 19.[20][note 4][note 5] Gunners on the bombers claimed 288 fighters shot down,[24][note 6] but Luftwaffe records showed only 25 to 27 were lost.
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Feb 11, 2024 10:23
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The disjointed nature of the Pacific for me is that the first cohort is treated with a level of reverence that is in sharp contrast with the second Makes people in the sledge story feel more human
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Feb 13, 2024 00:09
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Monica Bellucci posted:Wasn't she in the Leckie bits? She's the hollywood starlet Basilone is banging on his US tour
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Feb 13, 2024 19:03
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Most war media is, to some extent, also propaganda. Sure, you also have films like Platoon that are not, but those are relatively rare. That goes double for a war like ww2: think of all the depictions of war how many you see portray rape, for example, which by all historical accounts was very common on all sides. Anything air force related is going to be even more so the case. Because at that point you likely need official support of some form to be able to even film the thing. Masters of the air for example was supported by the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force. Masters of the air at least showed one plane going down in training, which is more than most other media. But you're never going to see a genuine portrayal of just the magnitude of deaths in training or due to mechanical failure.
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Feb 21, 2024 18:29
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twistedmentat posted:Yea, I know people get salty when WW2 productions act like America won the war on its own, but in a way, it kinda did, if you want to say its industrial might was the main force that won the war. The soviets got nearly to that point but you couldn't match the US, mostly due to their factories could operate without worrying about being bombed like nearly everyone else. Getting stuff to Europe was the issue, but even then by '44 it wasn't really that hard due to the advancements in sonar and the convoy system being perfected. No, in no way it "kinda did." By the time the bulk of the lend lease started reaching the soviet union, the Siberian divisions were already pushing back around moscow and the 6th army had already been encircled in stalingrad. The soviet factories east of the urals were just as unreachable for the germans as the American factories. This isn't to diminish lend lease. The soviets were only able to move as fast as they did because of it. But the soviets were beating the germans regardless. By 1942 the soviets were outproducing germany 5 to 1 in tanks in spgs. And the problem for the luftwaffe wasn't planes. It was pilots and fuels. Less than 1/4 of the me-262 delivered to the luftwaffe ever saw combat because of lack of pilots and fuel.
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Mar 2, 2024 08:19
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Like everyone else, I am sincerely puzzled by some of the choices made by the production here. Skip black thursday, skip big week, 8 seconds of d-day, but rando british spy, etc all get a lot of screen time.
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Mar 9, 2024 09:36
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kill me now posted:9x 45 minute episodes of them getting shot up in their aluminum tubes would probably get very monotonous. Since the 8th air force was doing the equivalent of a full frontal assault for much of the time it would be gratuitous and how many ways can you depict a bomber crew getting eviscerated before you loses interest. I think that there are the right elements there, but the mixture was off, leading to a lesser experience than BoB. The pressure to quickly scale up the number of pilots let to thousands of deaths in training. We see one of these, but its a one off thing that goes nowhere rather than be a more salient point. The “combat box” tactic is a bit of the story there, but it is, once again, the sort of stuff if you don't know anything you'll miss the significance. Much like flak suddenly becoming more effective because of “predictive barrage." There's an element of escalation in the air war over Europe that you can see pieces of in the background but never actually become a coherent narrative.
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Mar 10, 2024 03:13
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twistedmentat posted:I totally dive bomb with bombers in war thunder. I got really good with it too. But lop doing that irl. A little over 1400 me-262s were delivered, but only about 300 ever saw combat, due to a mixture of lack of fuel and lack of pilots.
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Mar 10, 2024 21:44
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ColonelJohnMatrix posted:I'm not sure if there is a WW2 thread or not but if there is I'd love the link! The frustrating part is that the air war, more than any of the other shows, is the one where you had the easiest to establish cohesive narrative. It's not the island assault x10 of pacific, for example. You could have easily done: war starts, US doesn't have enough pilots, so training goes crazy and lots of people die in training. When they finally make it to Europe, its smaller missions at the edges, then Lemay has the whole combat box idea. We dont need no stinking escorts. So you start getting the really big missions with all the insane losses. So the US takes this strike fighter and turns it into an escort fighter, and doolittle comes in and changes thee escort philosophy to where the fighters go ahead and hit the luftwaffe before they get to the bombers. And all of these things are things that are faintly alluded to in the show, they never coalesce around an actual narrative.
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Mar 11, 2024 17:02
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Octy posted:The finale was just fine. I did like how Buck and Bucky both retained their model good looks and perfect hair despite spending over a year in a POW camp. It's funny how there was a mandate to make Austin Butler look cool at all times. When they were getting out of the plane in Africa in episode 3 or 4, you see his crew getting out of the plane with their little leather helmets on and all that, and Butler comes out with just his amazing hairdo intact.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:23
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Yeah, this last episode is over the top even for this series in terms of "America number 1." Like, Rosie lands in no man's land instead of behind Russian lines just so we can the red army just shooting surrendering and running germans. And of course the pilots aren't freed, they liberate themselves.
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Mar 16, 2024 04:32
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:honestly that stuff felt like it came because of too many passes at the script Yeah. The show feels very much like whoever was in charge deciding to do the bare minimum to respond to someone going "what about x?"
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Mar 16, 2024 21:39
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Amblin/Hanks/Spielberg have gone out of their way in every show to make non-American troops look bad/uppity/ungracious in some way. While I would love a good eastern front series, I want these folks as far away from it as possible.
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Mar 17, 2024 18:49
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a dingus posted:Cool. I know Americans and probably folks in western Europe under appreciate the contributions of the red army. I know they were a powerhouse but to say they were by far the most organized and effective seems just as wrong as going "USA, USA #1 #1 WHOAAAYEAHH!!!! What? No, it's not. It's absolutely true that by the end of WW2 the Red Army were by far the most effective and organized. It certainly wasn't the Germans, and it certainly wasn't the Americans. That statement is as close to objective truth as you can get: the Red Army , depending on the particular moment, was facing between 2 and 5 times the number of troops on the eastern front as the allies were on the western front, and still were conquering territory faster and moving at a staggering speed. I don't know what is controversial about that.
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Mar 19, 2024 14:37
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a dingus posted:Dang, guess I was wrong. "USSR! USSR! #1 #1 whooyeah!! What do you think the reasonable answer to "who was the most effective army at the end of the war in Europe?"
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Mar 19, 2024 16:40
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M_Gargantua posted:Lot of Ambrose level takes ITT. While the Russian Army was by no means bad, they were not all that great in 1945 either. So the question remains: February of 1945 , which was the most effective and organized fighting force in ww2?
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Mar 19, 2024 23:32
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Mr. Grapes! posted:The arguments are always a little pointless because the Allies depended on each other in so many ways. But, they are interesting to think about. But the statement that started this whole thing wasn't "who'd win in a war," "who'd win ww3" or "how important was lend lease." A goon complained that they made Rosie land in the middle of rando russian soldiers walking around and shooting people because the red army was actually a massive and efficient force at that point, certainly the most efficient one. And said goon is right. First week February 1945 the red army has just finished the vistula-oder offensive in which over 2 million red army troops advanced 500km in 3 weeks, destroying or pushing back almost 40 german divisions. For comparison, on the western front the allies were just recovering from the battle of bulge in which problems with the allied line allowed the 21 german divisions to encircle allied troops in bastogne (portrayed in an episode of the same name in BoB). Like, real world Rosie landed behind Russian lines because when he bailed out the red army was already at the oder, amassing millions of people for the battle of berlin. I don't know how that is controversial and how it elicits all these "ah, but the navy" stuff.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:56
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Is that goon right? Jesus Christ this is getting really loving stupid. "The way I define efficiency..." get over yourself. Like, the complaint was an easy and obvious one. If they didn't want to show a massive battle east of the oder, they could have just portrayed what actually happened in the real world, where he landed behind Russian lines after the Russians reached the Oder, instead of in no man's land before. But I guess we now know who appreciates the after school special vibes of eastern front/concentration camps tour the show went for. No need for another multiparagraph essay on how actually the jingoism of the show is totally true, im done with this. joepinetree fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 14:57
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ColonelJohnMatrix posted:Is there a definitive-type eastern front book/series? I was riveted when Dan Carlin put out the Ghosts of the Ostfront hardcore history series around 15 years ago and would like to do some more reading on it. Probably the most famous and most cited is When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House But it is very dry "this division move here" type of stuff for much of it
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Mar 29, 2024 00:05
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My favorite thing that Ambrose got wrong is that Liebgott was Catholic, raised Catholic and raised his kids Catholic. Never drove a cab in SF, instead went hobo for 3 years before being found and getting married. He apparently told people in easy company he was Jewish, but never spoke with anyone again after the war.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:31
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twistedmentat posted:I've been rewatching Band of Brothers, and as always, i noticed new stuff. Like Hall, the guy who joins Easy to take the German guns, thats Moriarty from Sherlock. But the main thing I noticed is everyones always going "Has anyone seen Lt Meehan?" and unlike the members of Easy, the audience knows what happened to him. The last you see of him and his plane, is him going to Simon Pegg who needs to do something for him, but then it cuts to the plane getting it, and its the one that goes down in flames. I had never noticed that before. The mystery bags were "leg bags" and were a last minute suggestion by the British: https://www.101airborneww2.com/equipment3.html scroll down to legbag Idea was that it would dangle below the paratrooper so that it would hit the ground before the soldier, therefore reducing the odds of getting hurt on landing.
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May 9, 2024 05:06
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