Band of Brothers gets the glory, but Tom Hanks’ other WWII epic might be even more accurate

Right, so if you think Saving Private Ryan set the gold standard for gut-wrenching war films, it's not exactly a hot take. Spielberg nailed that dirty, unvarnished look at WWII — proper muddy, nerve-shredding chaos. No one leaves the cinema still thinking war is just medals and slow-motion flag waving. But when Spielberg joined forces with Tom Hanks and took that approach to TV, things got even more intense. First came Band of Brothers for HBO in 2001, which — 25 years and more prestige TV later — is still the war miniseries everyone quietly measures everything else against. Grimy realism, brutal fear, all the layers of human mess… but also that brotherhood you sort of hope you'd find if you landed in a Normandy hedgerow with bullets flying past your ear.

Band of Brothers debuted 25 years ago and remains one of TV's most lauded WWII series.

Let’s not pretend it was flawless. 'Historical accuracy' in Band of Brothers generally meant proper kit, meticulous sets, and the sort of boot camp you'd expect to break Hollywood actors. It still made slip-ups: most people now know the show wrote off Private Albert Blithe as dead when the real bloke survived and carried on serving. Minor grumbles, all things considered.

The Pacific: A Different Hell

Nine years on, Spielberg and Hanks are back — only now it's The Pacific, diving into the Pacific Theatre and quickly blowing apart any notion that one part of WWII is much like another. Instead of following one company of soldiers through Europe, the story jumps between three US Marines — Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), and John Basilone (Jon Seda) — each with a different view of the same hellscape. No single memoir as the Bible for the scriptwriters this time. Instead, it's a collage: With the Old Breed by Sledge, Leckie’s own account, plenty of military records, all stitched together for a more fractured, disorienting perspective — which feels about right for this side of the war.

• Robert Leckie — James Badge Dale
• Eugene Sledge — Joseph Mazzello
• John Basilone — Jon Seda
• Merriell "Snafu" Shelton — Rami Malek

The accuracy on The Pacific went to absurd lengths. Eighteen months on costume research alone, and you can practically smell the mildew. Basilone's military arc? Nailed it — re-enlists, heads back to the fight, dies at Iwo Jima, Medal of Honor in tow. There’s a bit of dramatic licence, like combining some of Basilone’s and Sergeant Mitchell Paige's Guadalcanal heroics into a single show-stopping scene, but for the most part, if it’s horrific on screen, it probably happened. Or worse: at least one notorious scene involving trying to drop rocks into the open mouth of a corpse is straight from Sledge's memoirs. More grim fact than horror-movie flourish.

The big difference with The Pacific is tone: it doesn’t bother trying to find any 'noble war' throughline. Combat is relentless, and arguably more graphic than Band of Brothers — not so much 'brave men under fire' as 'psyche-ravaging descent into madness.' You get Japanese forces using human shields (confirmed in records and newspapers), soldiers looting the dead for souvenirs — gold teeth included — and a general atmosphere of dehumanisation. The depiction of racial hatred and barbaric violence is present, honest, and intentionally hard to watch. Frankly, a fair number of the show’s darkest moments were even toned down from the eye-watering stories told by the real Marines.

Sledge's account of the front lines described the war as 'a netherworld of horror.'

If Band of Brothers had audiences glued for the heroics, The Pacific serves up the price humans pay for surviving such horror. The commitment to authenticity, for better or worse, only makes it harder to stomach — but impossible to look away. Everything, from the mud in the foxholes to the psychological scars, is detailed like a bad dream you remember for a lifetime.