Reel Critic:

The award season is over, and it will be a few months before Hollywood releases the summer blockbusters. For the most part, theaters are filled with forgettable films that are panned by critics and largely ignored by audiences. So where does the forlorn movie fan go for first-run quality entertainment?

Well, if you subscribe to HBO, I suggest tuning in to the new 10-part dramatic series “The Pacific.” This series is a follow-up to HBO’s excellent “Band of Brothers” (2001), which chronicled the World War II story of Easy Company, the 101st Airborne, from basic training to the Normandy invasion to eventual victory over the Axis powers.

As with the previous series, “The Pacific” is executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. “The Pacific,” as the title suggests, is a detailed accounting of America’s war against Japan. Starting with the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the story centers on the real-life experiences of three U.S. Marines, Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), John Basilone (Jon Seda) and Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), as they fight their way from island to island across the vast Pacific and finally to their uneasy return home after V-J Day.

It is somewhat ironic that a war film was just given the Academy Award for Best Picture. The winning film, “The Hurt Locker,” showed the unclear objectives of the Iraq war and the unconventional threat posed to U.S. forces due to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and attacks by insurgents or terrorists that are indistinguishable from our supposed allies.

Such ambiguity was not present in the Pacific campaign of World War II. Almost from the moment the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the military knew it had to take the battle directly to Japan. This was to be no easy task given that Japan controlled virtually the entire Pacific. In the same month Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it also invaded the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, Thailand, Shanghai, Midway, Singapore, Burma, Hong Kong and British Borneo.

“The Pacific” reminds us that war is mostly waged on both sides by young men just emerging from their teenage years. The brutality of the battles is gruesomely depicted as the well-equipped American forces throw every available man and their technological might against the dug-in, fanatical Japanese forces ready to literally fight to the death.

“The Pacific” presents war as the brutal enterprise it is. Whatever “glory” is associated with war is determined by the historians after the fact. The combatants themselves are young men thrown together by fate who are simply trying to stay alive.

So often in modern films, combat is portrayed as a video game on steroids with drones and laser-guided missiles taking out a shadowy enemy, sometimes from another continent. Whether done in by satellite surveillance or at the end of a bayonet, war is about killing. “The Pacific” doesn’t sugarcoat this fact, and such a frank portrayal is a tribute to the soldiers who sacrificed so much.

As the generation that fought World War II fades into history, the world they shaped by winning the last “great” war owes it to them to accurately chronicle their heroism and to never forget.

VAN NOVACK is the assistant vice president of institutional research and assessment at Cal State Long Beach and lives in Huntington Beach with his wife, Elizabeth.