Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I never thought I'd see something that would challenge the 1974, 26-part BBC production "The World At War" The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition) as a documentary but this 10-part documentary does that and it's a high definition remake of thousands of hours of film, most in color and most never before broadcast to the public.
From the earliest days of the war -- the 1930s in both Europe and Asia -- to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in Buchenwald, "World War II in HD" captures many of the most important battles and turning points of the war, all told in first person narrative from people that actually fought in war or covered it as war correspondents. This includes interviews with surviving veterans made in 2008-09 with people now more than 80 years of age.
Personally, this documentary struck a chord with me in one of the earlier hours on the battle of Tarawa, an archipelago of small islands in the Pacific that was a stepping stone to Japan and an important air base. My dad fought at Tarawa; he told me the four-day battle resulted in 6,000 deaths, 5,000 of which were Japanese. "We buried the Americans in graves and dug trenches for the Japs," dad told me.
The battle footage and narrative on Tarawa pretty much mimicked what dad told me only in much greater detail. It also mentions John Huston's 1944 documentary made on the American fight Marines At Tarawa (1945) that brought the war home to the public. "We wanted people to know we don't knock hell out of them every day," a voiceover says during the documentary about the battle and documentary that won the 1945 Oscar for short documentary.
And that's just one half-hour slice of this magnificent series. It tackles many of the important Pacific and European battles including Guadalcanal, Battle of the Bulge, Okinawa and the fight Americans had with the Japanese on American soil at Attu in Alaska's Aleutian islands. Every aspect of the war, from North Africa to bomber runs in Europe to nurses' roles in the Pacific, to the American depature and return to Bataan, the Tuksegee airmen, to FDR's death, the concentration camps, the Americans meeting the Russians in Berlin, and the atomic bombs in Japan, is covered in some detail with actual war footage you've probably never seen unless you saw it first on The History Channel.
The quality of the filmmaking, the restoration of the home movies to HD, and the scripting of individual voiceovers (sometimes by stars like Rob Lowe with a special plaudit to narrator Gary Sinise) from the real-life warriors is uniformly magnificent. Never does this film lag in one minute of its 10 hours. This is one of the most important World War II releases since "The World At War" and is is surely an instant classic of World War II storytelling. No fan of history should go without seeing this. Buy it for Christmas, either for yourself or for someone else.
[...]
Click Here to see more reviews about: WWII in HD
The only people to see the war like this were the ones who lived it. Until now… Seventy years in the making. Three thousand hours of color footage no one knew existed. The first documentary to show World War II from the perspective of both sides in full, immersive HD color, the world premiere HISTORY series WWII in HD uses the diaries of soldiers who fought in the war\'s biggest battles to create a personal, introspective and detailed look at life on and off the front lines. Though it was illegal for U.S. soldiers to carry diaries, many hid them away in their packs and recorded their experiences in detail. Now, through the use of these diaries and other source documents, as well as HD color and on-location shooting around the world, WWII in HD transforms their journey into a tangible piece of history. Culled from rare color archival footage from an exhaustive worldwide search and converted to HD with meticulous technique, WWII in HD provides a picture of World War II as it has never been seen before.Product Alert: Make sure that your Blu-ray player's firmware is up to date prior to playing this product. Visit www.amazon.com/firmware for more information on how to update your Blu-ray player's firmware.
0 comments:
Post a Comment