Critique of “Band of Brothers”
Band of Brothers is a book written by Stephen E. Ambrose in 1992. This book follows the Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, through World War II. Ambrose wrote this book with interviews from veterans and the research he completed on his own. During three years (July 1942 - July1945) from their training in England to the end of World War II, Ambrose tells us the unbelievable story of the Band of Brothers.
Besides of this book, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced in 2001 for HBO a ten part mini series based on Ambrose’s book. This mini series is the most expensive of his kind ($125 million of budget). Band of Brothers was met with extremely positive reviews from critiques and viewers (average of 8 million viewers per episode).
How the miniseries is different from the book that inspired it? In this critique of Band of Brothers, we are going to compare the book and the mini series through different categories such as characters, places, miscellaneous, hollywoodization, etc.
First of all in this part, we will discuss the fact that the miniseries is faithful to the book. Indeed, the HBO TV show covers most of the event of the book from the D-Day, June 6, 1944 to Hitler's Eagle Nest, May 4 1945. The only part missing in the mini series is the Easy Company’s training in England from 1942 to couple days before D-Day, we will discuss about this part later.
In the first episode, I find out that the moviemaker struggled in introducing the Easy Company to the viewers. Although, Ambrose had three chapters to do it, in the miniseries we are kind of confuse, there are a lot of names and it is hard to find the relationship between them and develop characters. Captain Sobel introduced the Easy Company, who has the group undergo hard drills and exercises. Sobel comes into conflict with his men, including Richard Winters, his executive officer. The