I bought it and actually completed watching it two nights ago. I quite enjoyed it, but it wasn't nearly as good as Band of Brothers. There was something about Band of Brothers that was far superior:
- maybe that they followed a single unit the whole time rather than a fractured approach between 3 different units/major characters
- perhaps direction was better in BoB (or casting) in that understanding who was who was easier done. For the longest time I couldn't decide if there was Leckie and Chuckler, or if they were the same person. They looked too similar with their helmets on - I actually didn't officially figure it out until the very end credits of episode 10, though I went back and forth throughout (actually, I probably did figure it out when Leckie came back from the hospital).
- While the soldiers appeared to not be having a good time, the direction/writing simply didn't go far enough in The Pacific, I think. I watched with the 2 minute historical background blurbs turned on (and have very little historical knowledge of the PTO), and I wouldn't have known that these guys went through hell and back by just watching the show. It wasn't enough - the fact that they were on these islands for months at a time wasn't sufficiently thrown into our faces. I kinda wondered why Leckie broke, why there was a suicide right in front of him (which was the biggest indication that what they were going through on Pavuvu sucked, but it felt like there was not sufficient context leading up to it), and especially why Gunny of the old guard broke.
Perhaps there was too much of a time frame to cover in The Pacific in BoB and it would have been too difficult to follow a single unit, I dunno. It seems like they may have been better off covering LESS of the war as a whole and more of certain important individual parts.