Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

No Ken Burns film about war can escape comparison with his celebrated earlier film on "The Civil War". That was a masterpiece. This is a . . . non-masterpiece. Why is this so? First and foremost, I think, for a reason over which Burns has no control. The nineteenth-century Americans who experienced the Civil War were living in a still-literate age. They wrote intelligent, moving, verbally compelling accounts of their thoughts and feelings in their letters and diaries. Despite the visual nature of film, it was these written words, movingly read by various actors, that, as much as the images shown, gave "The Civil War" its exceptional emotional force. The personal narratives in "The War" are told, for the most part, by the participants themselves, in the flat, small-words-simple-sentences speech that has become the only way we know to speak and write in the 21st century. What happened to those who lived through World War II is just as moving as what happened to their forbears; their telling of the tale is not. Second, World War II is still too recent an event not to have implications for today's politics, and thus to trigger our political biases. Burns, an obvious liberal, does not avoid this hazard. In this film, only Germany invades Poland; the simultaneous Russian invasion is unmentioned. The Soviet Union's willing, eager collaboration with the Nazis, up to the moment that Hitler finally stabbed Stalin in the back, is ignored. As to America, far too much time is spent on our domestic racial problems and how they bore on the war, including, for the umpteenth time, more soul-searching on the decision to intern Japanese Americans, a decision which at the time was defensible, and in any case inevitable. History into which we project our contemporary values isn't history; it's political argument. Third, and most fundamentally, it is not possible to tell a compelling story of World War II while confined to the post-Pearl Harbor American experience. That is why Herman Wouk's magnificent novel of the war, though primarily the story of an American family's wartime experiences, spends roughly half its prose on events prior to Pearl Harbor ("The Winds of War") and only half on events thereafter ("War and Remembrance"). Without the background, the foreground is distorted, and deprived of meaning. The best film history of World War II remains the independent British series "The World at War", no longer ubiquitous on television as it once was, but still available on DVD. There is also a good BBC film history.