Clevercell Very disappointing...

Borserie it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Leofwine_draca THE WAR is another exemplary documentary miniseries from filmmaker Ken Burns. Despite the lengthy running time (seven two hour episodes), this is never less than completely moving, engaging, and thoroughly insightful. I've already seen plenty of WW2 documentaries but it turns out that Burns still had plenty of say about the topic and plenty to teach. I like the way that the focus of the film is on four American towns, following the fortunes of various soldiers and pilots who enlisted for a hellish journey. The interviews are spellbinding, the unseen footage quite incredible, and Keith David's narration (along with that of uncredited Hollywood stars) the icing on the cake.

Rick Stevenson I've watched this mini-series at least a half dozen times at this point. Each time, I learn new things. Each time, I'm completely enthralled. There is so much insight, so many things that I did not know about World War II that it is sometimes difficult to absorb everything that's related. And this is, mind you, just from the point of view of the United States and its soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.In particular, the first person stories told by those who were there, who fought or were prisoners during the war, are very engrossing. Their stories are poignant, and you genuinely feel their losses and their grief. Even after so many viewings, I frequently find myself tearing up at certain points. This is one of the many things that speaks to the enduring quality of the documentary. Keith David's narration is spot on, providing an anchor that is sometimes necessary considering the material being discussed.In short: I cannot recommend this more. Watch it.

Robert J. Maxwell I don't know that this series -- perhaps "overlong series" -- is quite the equivalent of Ken Burns' "The Civil War" -- but what could be? The general outlines of World War II are so well known (Kids: We won) that I'll skip them and just make a few comments.The presentation is divided roughly into three equal parts: (1) Life on the home front in Mobile, Alabama; Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; and Waterbury, Connecticut; (2) Combat, with some references (not many) to overall strategy; and (3) Interviews with the surviving men and women who participated in the war.There are no reenactments, thank God. They're coming to be our substitute for B movies on documentary TV channels. There are no interviews with generals and admirals or today's War College instructors explaining why we did what we did. No British, German, Japanese, or otherwise exotic interviewees either. This is the war as seen strictly through American eyes although, as the narrator says, we suffered far less, relatively speaking, than many of the other combatants. It's an ipsative choice. If Burns had tried to cover just the Allies, some viewers would still be objecting. "Why don't we see more of Britain's suffering?" Or, "What about the Poles?" America suffered less but we suffered enough. There are about four minutes of color footage from a typical war-time wedding. We've all been there. The bride in frothy white, the groom in Army uniform, the cake, the two dozen assembled guests at the tables, with tiny glasses of punch, smiling nervously. It isn't until the second viewing that I realized that the uniformed groom was the only male present between the ages of eighteen and forty. All the other men were busy elsewhere. The music is chosen or composed by Wynton Marsalis, an ace trumpeter whose grasp of music includes all known forms. Mostly here, his score is alternately folksy, bluesy, or threnodic, and sometimes he quotes composers like Elgar and Faure. The score is punctuated with period music, like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. You won't come away whistling any of the tunes. Marsalis isn't the bombastic Richard Rogers of "Victory at Sea." He's unobtrusive, almost self effacing.The same can't be said of the film's producer, Ken Burns, who is almost childlike in his egocentricity and his commitment. "Ewww, Tom Hanks," he exults in the commentary. It would be easy to smear him a little if he weren't so good at what he does. The series, incidentally, was supported in large part by grants from Bank of America and General Motors. (At least they got SOME things right.) Another reviewer denigrated the series because it came from "the bolsheviks" at Public Broadcasting, which I guess makes General Motors a bunch of communists.Surprisingly little of the combat footage is familiar. A few rip offs from "Memphis Belle," "The Battle of Midway," and "The Battle of San Pietro," and not much more. Just as well. Those shelves had been just about emptied by all the documentaries that have played on The History Channel and The Military Channel.Is the presentation balanced? Or -- let me put it another way -- how much political correctness need we bear? Well, again, surprisingly little. It's a candid documentary rather than a critical one. The internment of Japanese-American civilians is described and shown but not dwelt upon. It's another mistake, a war-time tragedy, not an occasion for breast beating and white guilt. The good people of Mobile, Alabama, seem to have as much trouble with the influx of what they call "rednecks" as they do with what they call "Negroes." I kind of missed David McCullough's narration from "The Civil War." He's a cool and distanced historian, whereas Keith David's sonorous narration here is more dramatic. And I missed the sweetness and simplicity of "Ashokan Farewell." The film is about war. And war is about loneliness, deprivation, and death. It's easy to be moved by the subject when one imagines what we learn from these episodes about America multiplied a dozen times over by the suffering endured by other nations, victors and vanquished alike. But Burns has the good taste not to jerk the easiest tears. Nobody breaks down and sobs. The P-47 pilot who killed hundreds of Germans describes the paralysis of his trigger fingers and the nightmares that haunted him for years after the war, but he does so dispassionately, a careful observer of the symptoms that stand for the greater whole. It's about as good as it's ever going to get.These remarks cover only Parts 1 and 2 of the series.

gizmo61 Ken Burns has done it again. "The Civil War" was a masterpiece. "Baseball" was absolutely superb. And "The War" is another A+ piece of work. Why? Let me count the ways.1) All wars are hell. This time Burns was able to show what little he felt most humans could suffer without vomiting, some of which was filmed on the spot. Sure, some of the editing was a little choppy. Sure, vast areas of what happened in 1939-1946 had to be omitted by nature of the immensity and complexity of what happened. But most of the younger kids who thinks wars are only fought in the Middle East and who knew nobody in their families who died, or for that matter don't even know the dates of WWII, haven't a clue. So what if they didn't like the music? Hell, they didn't have Ipods or plasma tvs or cable then. Do some reading. Try to envision what absolute hell war is. Burns showed us.2) For the first time, we were able to hear it - extensively - from people who lived through it. How many wouldn't give a lot to sit down with the folks from those 4 towns who spent hours in interviews, to hear more about it? WWII affected, almost as much as the Civil War, everyone in the country. Go talk to them, kids. Hear what they have to say. You and your generation have never submitted to anything that meant a total effort by your country to remain free. You can't conceive what it means to say that dropping 2 A-bombs of necessity to end the war saved over 500,000 American lives. People today froth at the mouth when they read the media touting the nearly 4,000 dead in Iraq. How about saving 500,000 lives? This war was so immense and affected everything and everyone that every generation of Americans should be made to really study it. Never since have we faced what these people faced. And Burns shows it. All of it.3) We - you - can't view this documentary in terms you are comfortable with: instant gratification, burning the flag, anti-war demonstrations, cell phones and emails, and the whole plethora of me-me-me that exists today. You need to read what life was really like then, who did what and how they did it, what they believed in, what manners they had, what they were willing to die for. Burns gives you continuous examples of people from 4 American towns for 15 hours to try to tell you what Americans were willing to do to save their way of life from seriously evil sickos who were hell bent on destroying us. Those psychos in the Middle East have the same sort of plan to destroy anything in the west; similar to plans Hitler had to literally own the world and kill off those he felt were in the way and the plans that the Japanese had of making every western country a subservient fiefdom. Read about it. Read a lot about it (if you know how to read) and then watch the Burns doc. See what it took to stop them. Oh, Hitler and Tojo and Stalin, eventually, weren't that bad? They were only comic-book characters? If you believe that, you need a serious education.4) What happened in 1941-1945 happened. As in all wars throughout history, there were morons in charge of some, heroes in charge of others, misguided attempts, spectacularly successful attempts, incredibly unlucky attempts. But nothing ever so large, on such a scale of planning, training, executing, supplying, and staffing h as ever occurred in the history of man, and probably never will. And Burns eloquently captured some of its essence. Nobody could EVER capture all of it, or even parts of it, on the scale in which it happened. WWII was the last of the romantic wars. During WWII there were still espionage, undergrounds, passwords, night parachutings, spy chains, radio broadcasts, a whole litany of danger that stopped with the Cold War. After that, Korea and Vietnam and now the butchery in Iraq turned into cold, mechanical, medieval barbarism. Burns had to pick and choose the parts that brought the personalities of those from four American towns into view. And he did that very well.