I am a big proponent of reality television, and I don’t mean that crap genre that idiots refer to when pointing a camera at just any inbred hill billy. I am referring to anything that is either a documentary or is at the least based on reality – as in something important that really occurred. Recently I have been watching Tom Hanks’ and Steven Spielberg’s Pacific and it, much like Band of Brothers, is epic. Band of Brothers covers the World War II European Theater, focusing entirely on what the 101st Airborne did there. Pacific covers the same time period but takes place in the Pacific theater of war against the Japanese.

To watch Pacific one must first ready themselves for a reality that they may not normally stomach – war. Band of Brothers was amazing because of its depiction of war – realism as close as Spielburg could get it without being completely disturbing. Pacific does the exact same thing to a point that makes the viewer slightly uncomfortable – and they should be. Too often in film we depict war as this glorious thing where great people do great things – where the good guys storm in at the last moment to save the day. The reality is that there aren’t really good guys or bad guys, as that is all from a certain point of view, but rather two groups of people whose communication has broken down so badly that they felt the need to kill each other. World War II was that – but alas, this is not a history lesson.

If you feel that you can stomach reality, in the best way that Hollywood can offer it, get Pacific – Netflix has it. Not only does it cover the battles of the Pacific but it also goes over what people who lived through those battles battled in their out of combat lives. For instance one of the main characters falls in love, in his off hours, with a Greek woman who dismisses him from her life because she is too afraid that he will be dead soon. Those are the little things that most war films dismiss – war causes havoc in so many way.

I enjoy reality and Pacific delivers that.