Shallow, dull, and unnecessary, this documentary fails even to live up to its title.
To consider WWII's impact upon American life, this misnamed series starts at Pearl Harbor, relegating three years' European and five years' Asian warfare to the vaguest of backgrounds. The Nazi invasions of Poland and Russia get about a minute apiece. The Rape of Nanking is barely mentioned, in context of American newsreel consumption. Okay, fine, but don't call it "The War." Call it "Our War," or "Homefront" or "America's Americentric View of the War and How it Affected Americans." Don't insult the rest of the planet, which had already been fighting for as much as 50 months before December 7.
"The War" makes gestures toward a smalltown motif, but after a lot of talk about focusing on 4 towns, we spend time with soldiers from elsewhere. And the homefront imagery tells us nothing new: women joined the workforce. Rationing, victory gardens, no new cars. Blacks joined the workforce, racial confrontations ensued; Japanese-Americans were interned in cheerless prison camps. Guess what, Ken - I already watch PBS! Wait, wait - black and Japanese-American soldiers were segregated and under-appreciated, though they were just as heroic as everybody else. Betcha didn't see that coming. One surprise: uber-liberal public television makes exactly zero references to the experience of women in uniform.
(I'll tell you an exhaustive documentary miniseries we really need: a worm's eye view of how the troublemakers gear up to cause one of these awful world wars. This is the insight we could use, not "how did we defend ourselves?" but "how could we have been so ill-prepared as to not see this coming?")
A pretentious, plodding structure makes it worse. No single campaign is delineated beyond generalizations - "The siege of Saipan had only just begun;" "Bastogne would not be liberated for weeks." The first few hours especially contain a lot of rough, disorienting transitions. And the narration is redundant and occasionally nonsensical, as when Keith David tells us that Carlson's Raiders and Japanese Marines were sometimes "only a few feet" apart - this during hand-to-hand fighting. Who's signing off on this stuff?
This Ken Burns film needs among other things a Shelby Foote, a lively historical authority on whom the viewer may hang his faith and attention. Instead, somebody reads from contemporary journalism: Ernie Pyle, who already fumbled his own movie (a dog starring Burgess Meredith) or Al McIntosh, channeling Horton Foote. The veterans and civilians interviewed in talking-head format are charming, some of them, though only one or two show any real storytelling flair, and they do it late. Wynton Marsalis, who might have supplied our voice of wisdom, instead seems to have imagined Aaron Copland scoring a funeral of Norman Rockwell.
To consider WWII's impact upon American life, this misnamed series starts at Pearl Harbor, relegating three years' European and five years' Asian warfare to the vaguest of backgrounds. The Nazi invasions of Poland and Russia get about a minute apiece. The Rape of Nanking is barely mentioned, in context of American newsreel consumption. Okay, fine, but don't call it "The War." Call it "Our War," or "Homefront" or "America's Americentric View of the War and How it Affected Americans." Don't insult the rest of the planet, which had already been fighting for as much as 50 months before December 7.
"The War" makes gestures toward a smalltown motif, but after a lot of talk about focusing on 4 towns, we spend time with soldiers from elsewhere. And the homefront imagery tells us nothing new: women joined the workforce. Rationing, victory gardens, no new cars. Blacks joined the workforce, racial confrontations ensued; Japanese-Americans were interned in cheerless prison camps. Guess what, Ken - I already watch PBS! Wait, wait - black and Japanese-American soldiers were segregated and under-appreciated, though they were just as heroic as everybody else. Betcha didn't see that coming. One surprise: uber-liberal public television makes exactly zero references to the experience of women in uniform.
(I'll tell you an exhaustive documentary miniseries we really need: a worm's eye view of how the troublemakers gear up to cause one of these awful world wars. This is the insight we could use, not "how did we defend ourselves?" but "how could we have been so ill-prepared as to not see this coming?")
A pretentious, plodding structure makes it worse. No single campaign is delineated beyond generalizations - "The siege of Saipan had only just begun;" "Bastogne would not be liberated for weeks." The first few hours especially contain a lot of rough, disorienting transitions. And the narration is redundant and occasionally nonsensical, as when Keith David tells us that Carlson's Raiders and Japanese Marines were sometimes "only a few feet" apart - this during hand-to-hand fighting. Who's signing off on this stuff?
This Ken Burns film needs among other things a Shelby Foote, a lively historical authority on whom the viewer may hang his faith and attention. Instead, somebody reads from contemporary journalism: Ernie Pyle, who already fumbled his own movie (a dog starring Burgess Meredith) or Al McIntosh, channeling Horton Foote. The veterans and civilians interviewed in talking-head format are charming, some of them, though only one or two show any real storytelling flair, and they do it late. Wynton Marsalis, who might have supplied our voice of wisdom, instead seems to have imagined Aaron Copland scoring a funeral of Norman Rockwell.