You can’t blame Hanks for being protective. It was his idea, after starring in “Saving Private Ryan,” to turn Stephen Ambrose’s nonfiction best seller into a made-for-TV epic. Hanks was so passionate that he talked Spielberg out of adapting another Ambrose book so the two projects wouldn’t compete. Which does raise the question: what makes “Band of Brothers” different from all the other recent World War II movies, miniseries and books? “What we’re able to do is delve much farther across the scope of the experience than really anybody else can,” says Hanks. “We take two hours to deal with what they did in Holland and two hours to do the Battle of the Bulge. Some people might say, do you really need two hours to tell this? Yeah, we do in order to get down as deep as we want to.”
Unfortunately, “Band of Brothers” is often too big and sprawling to be effective drama. The cast of unknown actors is mostly indistinguishable from each other, and many soldiers come and go before we get to know them. By the time the first American dies in Normandy, we aren’t connected enough to him to care. And all the soldiers talk too much: about strategy, about their feelings, about each other. It sometimes feels as if the miniseries is giving us an oral history of the war, told in real time. Chatter between the bombs may well reflect true-life war experience, but it doesn’t make for great storytelling. Which isn’t to say there aren’t compelling moments in “Band of Brothers.” The battle scenes are both harrowing and weirdly gorgeous–and definitely not for the faint of heart. And the episode where the company stumbles across a concentration camp in Germany is tremendously moving. We’ve seen so many photos and movies inside the camps, it’s shocking to experience what it must have been like to discover their horrors without any warning. At its best, “Band of Brothers” is a valuable war chronicle, if not always potent television.
To their credit, Hanks & Co. were determined to stick to history–albeit a very American-centric version–rather than rely on cheap docudrama devices. “You don’t need to cut away to some idiot colonel somewhere in the back saying, ‘I tell you right now, it’s going to be a massacre out there if those guys don’t get those tanks down the road!’ " Hanks says. “You don’t have to create bogus conflict, because it’s already there. It’s part of the DNA of the project.” Hanks says he’s not worried that battle fatigue will keep viewers from tuning in, even though “Band of Brothers” is one of three World War II miniseries on TV this year alone. “To me, that’s like saying, when do you get tired of Renaissance paintings?” he says. “It’s not the same story told over and over again. It’s another examination of what is truly the tragic era of our time.” Does that mean there’s yet another World War II drama left in him? “Can the industry stand any more?” he says jokingly. “Look, compelling stories are compelling stories: period, the end.” Which probably means that for Hanks, the war goes on.
Band of BrothersHBO Starts Sept. 9
