Band of Brothers Review

The structural decision that makes this work is the rotating lead: each hour hands the point of view to a different man, so the series accumulates a company rather than a protagonist, and a death lands because you spent an hour inside that person's job rather than because the score told you to. Bastogne, shot almost entirely from a medic's foxhole in a frozen wood, is the clearest case, and Why We Fight turns the discovery of a camp into ten minutes of near-silence no war film has bettered.

Damian Lewis plays Winters as competence without vanity, a hard note to hold for ten hours. The photography is desaturated and mud-coloured in a way that has since curdled into cliché, but here it does work: the tree bursts at Bastogne terrify because the frame gives you no more information than the men have. Dialogue is functional and often deliberately flat, since these are soldiers talking about boots and ammunition. The veterans' interviews that open each episode remove any temptation to read the whole thing as adventure.