Much Ado...
Two-hours tonight, and all that hype...I hate to say it but Ken Burns' opening program for The War was a bit of a dud. And dull, too.
It's possible we have just been inundated with footage and tales of 'The Greatest Generation" (a term that irks...) for years and that's why this opening primer is all stuff we know and have, in some cases, seen before.
Maybe if the opening program had actually spent a lot more time with the families and people shown in the promos this series opener would have been a lot more special. I hope the series improves in subsequent nights.
Oh, and the music in places was just terribly inappropriate and odd. Hearing what sounded like banjo or strings over images of the invasion of Poland and the Battle of Britain was just plain weird.
posted by John Barth at
11:11 PM
1 Comments:
Ya know, I was worried that there might be a "WTF?" moment after this show launched. How could it possibly have lived up to the hype?
I think the Civil War program Burns did first was so well received, in comparison, because it was a war we Americans frankly knew little about. All of the Civil War generation was long dead by the time Burns got to it, and there was precious little media that survived, and certainly nothing like video or audio recordings. In many ways, you could craft any narrative you wanted from the materials available.
World War II, however, is a war we've seen before, a story that's been told countless ways on movie and TV screens since, what -- the 1950s? We've known this was "the greatest generation" for decades now. So in many ways doing a documentary about a war that is still -- albeit barely -- in living memory is going to be tough.
Anyway... I applaud the effort, of course. But I'm holding my breath to see if the show improves as the series wears on.
It better. Or it's one more nail in the PBS coffin.
By
John Proffitt, at 1:11 AM
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