It's pretty good but not the best thing ever like many claim it to be. And I'm prepared to get flamed for that but hey, I got family who are war veterans too. Having respect for the war doesn't mean you need to think that every movie or show about the war is the greatest thing ever. I have the utmost respect for the real life men depicted in the show, my criticisms are purely on the quality of the filmmaking.
Perhaps I came into it too late. It's a little over 20 years old now, and I've seen a lot of war movies in the last 20 years.
Some of my complaints:
Bad cgi/compositing. Some of the aerial shots are too fake looking, whenever they showed parachutes or airplanes from ground level it was an obvious compositing job. I know the show was made in 2000 but they should have not used any CGI in this show to make it look more authentic.
Editing. It still has that old style TV series editing where scenes just fade out when they end and then the next scene starts. Would have liked a more cinematic editing style.
Acting: Most of the main actors are pretty good but a lot of the acting during action scenes is pretty bad. In shots where you are supposed to see soldiers running for their life or hiding from gunfire, you can see actors smiling and laughing. Kind of distracted me several times. Michael Cudlitz in particular was a big offender of this. At one point a soldier right in front of him gets shot and when it switches to reverse angle of the reaction of him and his fellow soldiers and you can see he is trying not to laugh and a smile is cracking through.
Casting: I know yall keep defending Ross but they should have cast somebody else for that guy. Schwimmer always sticks out in everything he is in. My two cents, just cast somebody else. There are a million actors could have played that part. Schwimmer will always be Ross from Friends to the vast majority of the audience. FRIENDS was just too big of a show. It's like watching a movie and in walks Lucille Ball and expecting the audience to not be like "That's 'I Love Lucy!'"
Presentation: I'm not sure if the original TV broadcast was this way, but on Blu Ray every episode starts with a few war veterans talking. That should have been at the end of the episodes, or left as a special feature. We don't know who these dudes really are in their personal lives and I've always been cautious of glorifying an entire man because of one aspect of his life. What they did in the war was heroic, no doubt about that, but they did it because they had to, not much choice. The men themselves even say so - it was a job to them. For all we know they could be major assholes in their personal life. Maybe they ride on the war experience and use that as a means to berate anybody and everybody around them (we all know the type, the old man that walks around in his WW2 hat scowling at everybody). I just didn't care for those segments at all, just let me watch the show don't try and cram the real life dudes down my throat.
