Rating: 
Summary: Who did save Europe?
Review: I have seen this mini-series and like every movie that will ever be made by any film maker (US, Ireland, China, Germany, etc…) it is not an accurate account of what really happen. If the US did not save Europe who did? Was it the Russians, the French, the German’s? I forgot the German’s where conquering Europe. Ireland, who did HELP save Europe? Any way, I am thankful and grateful for all who fought to free Europe and the rest of the countries in this world. I am a naturalized citizen and retired member of the Arm Forces of the USA, who with out their sacrifices I would have not been able to come to this great, wounderful, and giving nation I call my home. It also shows the stupidity of the leadership of all nations, but most of all it shows the prize that Americans paid for the freedom we have today. God bless all those who fight for freedom. This is what this movie is all about, FREEDOM!
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Summary: The Band of Brothers is the Best Mini-Series ever.
Review: Executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks for HBO, Band of Brothers is a ten-part miniseries based on the book Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest by Stephen E. Ambrose. The series dramatically re-creates the path of Easy Company, an elite paratrooper unit, from their basic training at Camp Toccoa in Georgia in 1942, to D-Day, to their critical involvement in the Battle of the Bulge, through their triumph at the close of the war. The unit was one of the best trained and most productive in American military history, but it also suffered immense casualties. The series is an ensemble piece, involving dozens of characters, and cast with relative unknowns. To the extent that there is a central character, it is Dick Winters (Damian Lewis), who went to Toccoa as a lieutenant and was promoted, over the course of the war, to battalion commander. Each episode includes brief excerpts from present-day interviews with some of the surviving members of the company. While the series is not a hagiography, Winters is depicted as a brave, resourceful, and humane leader. It's clear that the men revered him, and that he genuinely respected and cared about them. There are a few other members of the unit that make a strong impression. Sobel (David Schwimmer of Friends), their C.O. at Toccoa, is depicted as a petty tyrant whose men bond together in their hatred of him. Nixon (Ron Livingston of Office Space) is Winters' fellow officer and best friend, and an alcoholic. Carwood Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) is a decent, hard-working man, and a tremendous soldier who earns a battlefield commission for his exemplary leadership. Bill Guarnere (Frank John Hughes) fears nothing, and is known for his wise-guy attitude and hot temper. The series dramatizes the courage and fortitude of many others, but it's clear that Winters sets the tone for his men, and plays a pivotal role in the unit's success. The project involved several screenwriters, including Graham Yost (Speed) and E. Max Frye (Something Wild). Eight different directors were called upon for the ten installments, including Hanks, David Frankel (Miami Rhapsody), Mikael Salomon (Hard Rain), and Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams). Still, the tone and style of the series remains fairly consistent. While the story of Easy Company has been condensed and altered in some minor ways for dramatic purposes, and much of the dialogue was, by necessity, invented, the producers placed a strong emphasis on accurately depicting the conditions under which these men lived, fought, and died. Several survivors from the company consulted on the project, and an enormous amount of money was spent on sets, costumes, and special effects in order to re-create their experience.
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Summary: Clearly the Best Film Treatment of WW2
Review: Hey, did you hear about the one-star reviewer who accidentally shot himself in the head? Although brain-damaged, he lived to write a review! Nyuk nyuk. Band of Brothers is obviously the best film work ever done about World War II. And there's a lot of good stuff out there. To mention just one, there's Charles Guggenheim's one-hour documentary entitled, D-Day Remembered. What else can I say?
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: This is the greatest series I have ever seen. I have seen it at least 5 times when it was on TV and I will probably purchase the DVD collection soon. The acting and direction are awesome, every detail was perfect. The war scenes were the most realistic I have ever seen. It was impossible to turn away from the TV. This is the best WWII or altogether war movie I have ever seen. You must watch this.
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Summary: Lessons of War in Finest Mini-Series Ever
Review: "Band of Brothers" is the most in-depth attempt by a film to depict the experience of a infantry rifleman in sustained modern combat. It faithfully follows Stephen Ambroses' wonderful book of the same title, tracing a company of paratroopers from the training camp at Toccoa to the end of the war at Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. It benefits from an impeccable cast, modern post-Private Ryan battle effects, and incredible attention to detail. This is a grognard's must-have. And, like its soulmate "Private Ryan", due to its realism it renders most earlier and less-sophisticated WW2 films nearly unwatchable.
Company E (Easy), 506th Airborne Regiment participated in the three pivotal battles of the Western European Campaign in World War II: D-Day, Market Garden (the failed attempt to seize the Rhine River crossing in Holland), and at the siege of Bastogne during Hitler's December 1944 Ardennes Offensive. Because of their status as elite troops, the paratroopers were cold-bloodedly employed longer in battle, and against greater odds, than most equivalent units. A point made repeatedly in the film is the enormous turnover caused by casualties, as more and more of the long-term characters we become comfortable with are wounded, killed, or incapacitated by combat stress. Yet these troops were consistently thrown into the breach because of their reliability and lethal commitment to survive.
The most valuable aspect of the film, which is not peopled by big-name actors, is in portraying the plight of line infantrymen. The American method of waging war whether in World War II, Korea and especially Vietnam, imposed the burden of ground combat on a minority of units and individual soldiers at any given time. What happens to these soldiers is the stuff of Band of Brothers - and if this is the fate of elite troops, one can only imagine how more standard units filled with a mix of draftees and enlisted men fared. Ambroses's book and the movie follow the progression from the gung-ho D-Day battles to the first setback at Einhoven, and the frozen, starved soldiers torn apart by German artillery at Bastogne. Ultimately, some of these soldiers crack, and company commanders finally refuse to take risks pre-empting higher authority.
The book and film are both a "Greatest Generation" tribute and a lesson, in a way, a powerful anti-war statement of their own. Ambrose's moral is that every soldier, no matter how well trained or elite, has a "breaking point" beyond which he or she should not be expected to endure. The realties of modern war are such that unless the combat experience is in the context of a "splendid little war" such as Panama or the 1991 Gulf War, human beings were not meant to be exposed to a constant lethal environment for months on end. Seemingly this lesson has to be re-learned in every sustained war, including the one we are now in.
Must Read: Stepehn Ambrose's "Band of Brothers" and related titles. Other great related films: "Private Ryan" (of course), the German films "Das Boot" and "Stalingrad", and (a possible surprise here) "Memphis Belle."
Rating:
Summary: WOW
Review: Make no mistake about it, this is the most powerful mini-series to have hit television. It is certainly the finest television I have ever seen, and easily joins with Roots, Holocaust, as one of the seminal works of television. It is impossible not to follow this series and garner respect for the men being portrayed in Easy Company - and all soldiers of this and every war.
Although billed as a mini-series, it really is a ten hour film of such sweeping power that words practically fail me to describe the overwhelming emotions I experienced while watching Band of Brothers. From boot camp through the end of the war, we get to know these men, see their hopes and lives dashed, the promise of living unfulfilled in too many cases and just what the ravages of war cost us all.
The battle scenes are terrifyingly realistic in their reenactments, the acting, direction, attention to every detail nothing less than perfect. While each episode is a masterpiece, for some reason episode 6 "Bastogne" seemed to especially resonate for me and it was impossible to watch this episode without viewing it through tears.
There's not much more to say than "Band of Brothers" may be the finest film, television, whatever you want to call it that I've ever seen.
Rating: 
Summary: better than saving private ryan
Review: spielberg and hanks have made a masterpiece of real stories from Easy Company 101st Airborne.the overall is an improved version of saving private ryan. it is still focus on the americans but you have a lesser feeling of it than in SVP (you're not given a focused image of the american flag).
Rating:
Summary: Perfection.
Review: Several years go, I saw the first few episodes of this when it first hit HBO. Though I loved it, I took up a night job and couldn't see the last 7 episodes on TV when they first aired. Fast forward to the spring of 2004. I was in college then and my friends decided that instead of pissing our nights away playing videogames and watching anime (ugh, the horror! What an utter fool I used to be!), we'd watch Band of Brothers, one episode a night for a week. Having only seen a few episodes I was enthusiastic to finish the series. The plan to watch one episode a night tanked right away, we ended up watching two a night. We only refrained from watching three or four because honestly, what hardworking college student has four hours to put aside for watching TV on a Wednesday night?
There were differences right away between what I'd seen on TV a few years ago and what I was watching now. At least, I thought it was different - I remembered seeing something "good", but what I watched that spring was simply incredible. I had no concept of what I had been watching when I saw the first episodes during high school. This series is moving, highly emotional, and quite honestly, the best thing I have ever seen on a screen. I will say again for clarity - it is my humble opinion that this is the best thing ever put to film. People write this off as "GI Joe" action and mindless Nazi-killing. I really wonder if they saw the same series I did. If reviewers say that this is only about the action, they've missed the point. The heart of this series is really the men and how they react to combat. I was deeply moved by the characters (especially Dick Winters and Lewis Nixon, played by Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston, respectively), got a sense of the horrors of war (particularly the Normandy jump and the hellish artillery barrage outside Foy), and was brought to the brink of tears multiple times - Bastogne and the aforementioned Foy among others. I am not a man that cries easily, either. My girlfriend (what a gal!) got me the boxed set for Christmas, and after watching the series a second and third time through I can honestly say that if anything, I was more profoundly affected on successive viewings.
As a side note, a friend and I saw Dick Winters speak a couple of weeks after I finished watching Band of Brothers in spring 2004 - anybody who says the characters are unbelievable or unrealistic is absolutely and irrevocably wrong. Winters, the man, was EXACTLY the same as Winters, the character. Standing outside that high school auditorium I'd driven out to (it was filled past capacity), I felt I'd already seen him before - ten hours' worth!. Damian Lewis did one hell of a job portraying his character. Watch the special features ("We Stand Alone Together" particularly) and it's obvious that the rest of the characters are more or less dead-on as well. It's easy to say guys like Bull Randleman and John Martin were cliche or stereotypical, but I suspect that what we see on-screen is closer to reality than we can know. Watching Babe Heffron being interviewed on the special features disc is a good example - in the series, Heffron is a smart-alecky kid from Philadelphia. In interviews, he comes across as an old, smart-alecky guy from Philadelphia. Ditto on Bill Guarnere. In "We Stand Lone Together", Martin comes across as being like his character, Popeye comes across as being like his character, Shifty Powers comes across as being like his character - you get where I'm going with this? I came away thinking that the characters were extraodinarily true to the real men. That's quite a feat in Hollywood these days.
5/5 stars. The series isn't just recommended - it's imperative you see this.
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Summary: Astounded! Absolutely my favorite picture ever!
Review: I've watched a lot of movies, I've been a netflix member for a long time usually getting 30-50 DVD's a month. Of all the movies I've seen in my 22 years on this planet, I can say without question, Band of Brothers is the most moving piece I have ever seen, each and every disc. It is the only DVD(well, Box set of DVD's) I have bought in a long time because it's just something that you'll want to watch over and over and you can watch it with any friend or loved one and it will be appreciated. They probably couldn't have found a much better pick than Damian Lewis for the leading role in this mini-series, and the rest of the cast is just terrific. From their training before D-Day all the way to the end of the war, you're glued to the set. It's the perfect blend of emotion, WWII action, clean humor, and the bravery that simple small town Americans brought to Europe. I used to be a moderate fan of the time period during WWII, but after watching just into the first disc, it made me want to jump in the screen and stand at attention alongside Easy Company. 5 Stars and worth every penny ten times over. CURAHEE!
Rating:
Summary: I watched all 999 minutes and wanted more!
Review: My only complaint is that it wasn't twice as long! Follow Easy Company of the 101st Air Born from the stress and tension of boot camp, the horrors of Normandy, the failed campaign of Market-Garden in Holland, the cold winter at Bastogne, the liberation of Jewish concentration camps, the capture of Hitler's personal palace, to the end of the war.
Each episode tells the story of the entire company but also focuses on individual soldiers, officer, and medics. Some survive to the end of the war, many do not. By the end of the last episode I felt like I had been there and fought by their side.
Again, if the series had been twice as long I still would have wanted more. This DVD collection is a set I will watch a thousand times and not be bored. A true masterpiece.
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