Generation Kill DVD Review

Emmy-winning HBO Miniseries is a Gripping Portrayal of Recon Marines

Sep 20, 2009

Creators of "The Wire," David Simon and Ed Burns, offer a sometimes-tragic, sometimes-hilarious, all-too-real look at Recon Marines at the start of the 2003 Iraq war.

Generation Kill is a seven-part HBO miniseries from David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire. Based on the book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, it tells the story of an elite group of Reconnaissance Marines at the beginning of the Iraq war. And it's utterly brilliant.

Cpl. Person: "You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps? You get your brains back."

Just before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Evan Wright embedded with the Marine Corps' First Reconnaissance Battalion, Bravo Company. There he got to experience the unique subculture of Recon Marines.

Recon Marines are basically the Marine Corps' special forces. Recon's expertise is in swimming and parachuting behind enemy lines, collecting intelligence, and leaving without alerting the enemy. So naturally, in the Iraq war their commanders put them in unarmored, open-top Humvees and made them drive through the desert as bait for the bad guys.

What follows is a bureaucratic nightmare that'd be funny if people's lives didn't hang in the balance. Actually, it's still funny, mostly because the men themselves ridicule it as it happens. To wit: they can't get enough batteries to power their night vision goggles. They don't have the parts to fix the Humvees that break down even before the start of the war. Their chemical warfare camouflage is forest green, despite that they're invading a desert country. The list goes on.

Sgt. Espera: "This is like Gilligan's Island – they're giving us rocks and coconuts to make radios with."

The answer to all their frustrations? "Marines make do." It's basically the mantra of the series – everyday guys trying to do the best they can in the face of maddening, ludicrous, heart-breaking situations. It's not popcorn TV; it's not easy to watch.

David Simon and Ed Burns don't try to make it easy. They don't introduce characters. They don't spell out each acronym or military term – though they do explain some to the reporter, who's as overwhelmed as the audience. And while the miniseries isn't gory, it does show the reality of killing in war. Simply put: they don't dumb it down. They drop the viewers into the middle of this conflict and expect them to be smart enough to figure it out.

It's nice when a show's creators count on the intelligence of the audience; it happens so rarely.

"When I first read the scripts," Kocher says, "I was just laughing my ass off because I remember half the guys saying a lot of dialog that was written." (The Hollywood Reporter, 4 June 2009)

Like The Wire, Generation Kill lives and dies by its authenticity. The producers hired some of the portrayed Marines to serve as consultants. Among them were Sergeant Rudy Reyes, Sergeant Eric Kocher, and Corporal Jeffrey Carisalez. While initially hired to ensure accuracy and train the cast, all three ended up playing Marines in the show, though only Reyes played himself.

Reading Generation Kill the book can be eerie given how much of the dialogue is word-for-word from the mouths of real Marines. It's racist, homophobic, classist, misogynist, anti-PC, anti-religious, and astoundingly profane. If it hadn't really happened, David Simon and Ed Burns would likely be criticized for making a mockery of the Marine Corps.

Simon and Burns make the keen choice to be politically-neutral. This is a miniseries about the Iraq war that does not preach. The characters themselves sometimes argue about politics – like Cpl. Person's running commentary about the 'real' reason they're in Iraq, because of NAMBLA or the Iraqi's lack of sex – but the show itself does not editorialize. "We figured, if you play it down the middle, there's enough cannon fodder for both sides to glom onto," Burns says. "This was not a propaganda piece" (The Hollywood Reporter, 4 June 2009).

"This series doesn't say the war was wrong; it doesn't say the war was right," Kocher says. "It's not politically charged. It doesn't have an agenda" (Ibid). One cannot discuss the miniseries but in contradictory terms: dense-but-hilarious, weighty-but-irreverent, political-but-not. It's as if Simon and Burns aimed to defy categorization.

Generation Kill DVDs

Sgt. Reyes: "Guy's like 8-feet tall in the movie!" (on Sgt. Colbert; from the DVD Roundtable)

For those new to the miniseries, the Generation Kill DVD set is excellent. For everyone who watched it live, it's perfectly acceptable. It includes organizational charts with pictures, along with maps and a glossary of key terms. Extras are mostly the featurettes that were available on HBO OnDemand, though the episode commentaries are new and worth the price of the DVDs in and of themselves. Not to be missed is the unedited Roundtable with the real Recon Marines and Evan Wright. Most bizarre are the audio-only deleted scenes, which seem like they've been sound-corrected…so why are they audio-only?

Finally, the cast deserves kudos. They filmed for seven months in Africa and the result is remarkable. Alexander Skarsgard (Sgt. Colbert) gives nothing less than a star-making performance. Stark Sands (Lt. Fick) superbly portrays the slow death of a man's ideals. James Ransone (Cpl. Person) is utterly believable spouting his character's manic, brilliant observations. The excellent Jon Huertas (Sgt. Espera) also deserves recognition for the nuance and humor he brings to some of the most explosive dialogue. And Lee Tergesen (Evan Wright) shines as usual.

Generation Kill was nominated for 11 Emmys; it won 3 at the Creative Arts presentation and was shut out of the Primetime presentation. Though it didn't take home the Emmy award for Best Miniseries, it remains a marked achievement, hailed by The A.V. Club as the best made-for-TV movies/miniseries of the ’00s. It does justice to its subjects and addresses an important issue, for which it deserves the highest esteem.

The copyright of the article Generation Kill DVD Review in TV Show DVDs is owned by Kimberly Shumway. Permission to republish Generation Kill DVD Review in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.