A documentary series on the key battles and campaigns of World War 2. For each episode we see the key commanders involved, main weapons, key units, strategy and tactics, the development and history of key factors to that point and the history and outcome of the battle.
Absurdly long-winded. Each episode really only had about 30 minutes of material on the battle/campaign yet I guess the producers felt the general running time of each episode is 90-120 minutes so they had better fill it. Each aspect of the campaign has its history traced back as far as it will go, often to World War 1, every commander gets a several-minute bio (and there's heaps of commanders), tangential history is discussed. So much unnecessary filler.
Clearly the producers were aiming for quantity rather than quality or they thought that quantity equals quality (at least in the viewers' eyes).
It also doesn't help that I already have a very good knowledge of the subject, making the padding even more unnecessary and boring. Even for less knowledgeable people this format is not great as you keep wondering when they are going to get to the relevant stuff.
This issue is also caused in part by the fact that there is no continuity between episodes. If the series was a chronological look at the major battles of WW2 you wouldn't need most of the background stuff as the previous episodes would have provided it. Instead we have battles in random order with no dependence between them, so the background to one battle gets repeated in a related (historically but not related in the series) battle.
To crown it all off we have narrator Tim Pigott-Smith droning on endlessly. David McCullough or Sir Laurance Olivier he certainly is not. On that note, for the definitive, and an infinitely more interesting, documentary on WW2 watch The World At War instead.
On the plus side, all the detail you need is there. The problem is wading through all the endless filler to get to the good stuff.
Absurdly long-winded. Each episode really only had about 30 minutes of material on the battle/campaign yet I guess the producers felt the general running time of each episode is 90-120 minutes so they had better fill it. Each aspect of the campaign has its history traced back as far as it will go, often to World War 1, every commander gets a several-minute bio (and there's heaps of commanders), tangential history is discussed. So much unnecessary filler.
Clearly the producers were aiming for quantity rather than quality or they thought that quantity equals quality (at least in the viewers' eyes).
It also doesn't help that I already have a very good knowledge of the subject, making the padding even more unnecessary and boring. Even for less knowledgeable people this format is not great as you keep wondering when they are going to get to the relevant stuff.
This issue is also caused in part by the fact that there is no continuity between episodes. If the series was a chronological look at the major battles of WW2 you wouldn't need most of the background stuff as the previous episodes would have provided it. Instead we have battles in random order with no dependence between them, so the background to one battle gets repeated in a related (historically but not related in the series) battle.
To crown it all off we have narrator Tim Pigott-Smith droning on endlessly. David McCullough or Sir Laurance Olivier he certainly is not. On that note, for the definitive, and an infinitely more interesting, documentary on WW2 watch The World At War instead.
On the plus side, all the detail you need is there. The problem is wading through all the endless filler to get to the good stuff.