The Pacific Review

The combat photography is the best the network has produced. Peleliu is staged as an unbroken white glare of coral and phosphorus in which nothing can be seen and everything can kill you, and the airfield crossing is genuinely difficult to watch. Where the earlier series was about a company that became a family, this one is about isolation: men fighting an enemy who will not surrender, in a climate that rots equipment and skin, for objectives nobody can explain.

Joseph Mazzello's slow transformation from a sensitive recruit into someone who considers pulling gold teeth from a corpse is the strongest thread. Rami Malek is unnervingly good in support. The structure is the cost. By following three separate marines who rarely meet, the series denies itself the ensemble that made its predecessor so easy to love, and the early episodes take a long time to establish who is who. The romantic interlude in Melbourne stalls the momentum badly. Uncompromising, superbly made, and much harder to return to.