Generation Kill

"You Americans have killed a lot of sand. The sand was very evil."

From a video I saw this looked quite interesting so I bothered to watch it, but really, the main reason I bothered was because it was done by the two guys who created The Wire, the greatest television show (at least in my opinion) of all time.

Title: Generation Kill
Year of Release: 2008
Creators: David Simon & Ed Burns
Genre: Drama/War
Rating: 9/10

This mini-series follows the 1st Recon Marines who has a Rolling Stone reporter attached to their crew to report during America's invasion of Iraq 2003.

Much like The Wire this show is incredibly realistic. I'm no soldier or master of military tactics, but you don't need to be to know how realistic this show is, there are no super-hero's in this film, no Rambo's, there are simply real people fighting a war. One man won't just take on about 50 armed with a mere pistol and his trusty spoon[?]. It's so much more enjoyable when the show/film you are watching truly feels authentic.

One thing among the many great things with this show, is that it does a very good job of showing how incredibly morbid the war is, it doesn't sugarcoat is, it certainly isn't propaganda made to make you want to join the military. It shows badly hurt or killed children, and America soldiers accidentally or purposely killing innocent unarmed civilians. As I've said, it's very graphic for effect, it really wants to get the point across that this war that is going on is ridiculous, and the American's approach at certain elements was very stupid and heartless. This isn't anti-American or anything, don't get me wrong. The affect of the war has a different effect on numerous of the soldiers, some enjoy it and love shooting, etc, whereas some are deeply affected by the war and feel a great sadness to what is going on, and how ruthless they must be. I felt when they saw the passports of some of the "soldiers" they had killed and realised that the men they had just killed were in another country and came specifically to fight off the Americans, some of the contents of their wallets even showed some of them were attending University, I thought that was very effective. The name really does say it all.

The action sequences throughout the series were phenomenal. They managed to make them very exciting, sad, shocking and beautiful at the same time, particularly at night. At night in the distant towns and villages you would see explosions and gunfire, it really did look amazing. Of course. The sadness shown in the action sequences, as I have mentioned would be definitely regarding when innocent people were killed, they don't just touch on this element once, it is quite frequent. Well, shocking is quite self explanatory.

I know I haven't really done the show much justice here, so I'll quickly just wrap this up, the show is fantastic. Everything basically is great, the only real flaws in the show I feel are regarding certain characters, mainly that they were either annoying or cliché to some extent. I recommend this show to anyone interested in the war still going on, this is quite realistic and at no point is it ever boring. Actually, to add to the downsides, it is very short, only 7 episodes, but then I guess it is a mini-series..

Click me to view a video on this show!