It may be because WWII is once again in vogue, it may have something to do with the fact that these two geezers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are executive producers, but HBO’s new mini-series The Pacific has become one of the fabled ‘television events of the year’. Building on the legacy of the 2001 WWII drama Band of Brothers, this new ten-part series aims to take the form to new heights of gritty realism. What results is a visually astounding, but not entirely convincing, piece of drama.

In an attempt to justify what is essentially a Band of Brothers rehash, The Pacific focuses on the often neglected war against Japan. The series intertwines the true stories of three US Marines, Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge and John Basilone, basing the narrative around their respective memoirs.

Unfortunately, whilst this seems a firm basis for a series striving for absolute realism, at no point do the soldiers’ onscreen counterparts seem at all realistic. The dialogue is so awash with 40’s American, war-time clichés that the real men behind the script are transformed into little more than caricatures. The acting doesn’t help much either, as the three leads share the unfortunate tendency to make acting look really, really hard.

Of course, these are common problems in WWII dramas. It seems whenever Hollywood comes round to tackling ‘the big one’, they feel the need to be cautious, take fewer chances and rely on the formula, drifting between epic battles and sycophantic depictions of ‘the greatest generation’. Indeed, the only way in which The Pacific stands out at all, is the incredible scale of its battle scenes. Whilst I’m usually one to find such bells and whistles rather tedious, in this case it is the series’ saving grace.

On set, Hanks supposedly remarked that this show is the first to truly get “under the helmet” of a WWII soldier and The Pacific definitely lives up to this claim. Whereas the majority of WWII dramas feel the need to recreate the multiple facets of the war, this series focuses its narrative solely on the experiences of its three main characters. Instead of providing the perspective of the enemy or juxtaposing scenes in the foxholes with war-room decision making, all we see is what Leckie, Basilone or Sledge experienced. In one mesmerising scene, Leckie’s platoon come under fire in the middle of the night; the audience, along with Leckie, have no idea the enemy are even there until they open fire and no idea what they look like until the bodies are collected at daybreak. This elevated realism not only becomes The Pacific’s most potent means of representing the brutality and dehumanising effects of war, but also begins to compensate for its painfully delivered dialogue.

The Pacific is one of many WWII dramas that fails to realise the fallibility of its subject matter. Many writers treat WWII as the ultimate basis for drama and The Pacific makes the assumption that this alone will make it a compelling watch. As a result, in scenes of poor scripting or dull acting, the audience is left to fill the emotional gaps, as we all know how awful it was, but this is exactly the problem, we can’t possibly comprehend the situation these three men found themselves in. However, whereas such half baked emotional scenes fail in making us understand, the battle scenes force us to live it, and never before have we been taken so close to the front line.

The Pacific debuts on Sky Movies HD on Monday April 5th