![]() Recent big-screen fare such as “Stop-Loss” and “In the Valley of Elah” were box-office duds. Still, the track record for Iraq-related productions is hardly encouraging. Regardless of whether they believe this to be the right war at the right time (or not), I’d like people to think clearly about the nature of modern war itself, and to acknowledge, at least, that whether it’s justified or not, war is hardly as clean, precise and clinical as we wish to imagine it.” “I’m not interested in preaching to a choir of those opposed to the Iraq mission, or merely validating the adventure of that mission by telling the tale of these young Marines. It’s in those moments that you really get to know our characters.”īut will people want to watch it? Simon, who is accustomed to playing to niche audiences with “The Wire,” is hopeful. “They say a lot of war is about the waiting. “We weren’t afraid of depicting the downtime,” says Susanna White, who directed Parts 1, 2, 3 and 7 of the miniseries. Tonight’s opener, for example, spends much of its time in Humvees, absorbing the spirited banter between soldiers. “Generation Kill” is different from other war films in that it isn’t tethered to what Simon calls “visual hyperbole or grandiose drama.” In fact, it gravitates in the opposite direction as “The Wire” did, often capturing those small and intimate moments of human interaction. ![]() And I think a lot of people who have been in this situation kind of understand that.” “(But) when you get a lot of alpha males jammed up together with a lot of time on their hands, this is the way they test each other. “I think the language is obviously going to offend a lot of people,” Burns says. It also captures their gritty dialogue, which is often peppered with profanities and racial and homophobic slurs. In hitching a ride with the Marines as they trek from Kuwait through Iraq on their way to invade Baghdad, the series captures their ideology, their fears, their dark sense of humor and, in some cases, their unnerving blood lust. “Generation Kill” immerses viewers deep into the world of Recon Marines, who are among the military’s most elite. “We really were like a band of brothers.” All we had was each other,” says Jon Huertas, who plays Sgt. Then it was off to an intense seven-month shoot in the deserts of Namibia, Africa, that led to some very military-like bonding. In the painstaking quest for accuracy, Simon and Burns put their young actors through a 10-day boot camp overseen by Kocher, a former Marine sergeant who earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for valor during an enemy ambush near Fallujah. ![]() It was our job to try to stay as close to that book as we possibly could,” says Ed Burns, a Vietnam veteran who served as co-executive producer for the project, along with David Simon, his partner on “The Wire.” ![]() I think people are kind of interested in that.”īased on an award-winning book by embedded journalist Evan Wright, the miniseries recounts, in astonishing, almost documentary-like detail, the exploits of the brash young Marines in the Bravo Platoon of the First Reconnaissance Battalion – the “tip of the spear” for America’s military march into Iraq. You don’t see any of the (phoniness) that you see in a lot of war movies. “I think this is one of the first movies or series where you actually get to see what it’s really like over there. “(Other films) start throwing in all this extra (phoniness) that obviously would never happen and you lose the watcher right away,” he says. Meanwhile, war fatigue seems to be setting in among the public and in the media, where coverage of the conflict has dramatically waned.īut none of that fazes Eric Kocher, the military consultant for “Generation Kill.” He believes the HBO epic, which comes from the producers of the highly acclaimed crime series “The Wire,” has a solid chance to win hearts and minds with its gritty, unflinching authenticity. Viewers have stayed away in droves from recent Iraq-themed movies and television shows. The network’s timing, it seems, couldn’t be worse. On July 13, HBO proudly launches “Generation Kill,” an ambitious seven-part miniseries about a group of Marines in the early days of the Iraq war.
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