Flash Reviews: Generation Kill [television]

Generation Kill (2008)
War/Docu-Drama; USA
7 episodes, 60 mins each

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Having absolutely loved "The Wire" and "The Corner", I was really psyched to check out David Simon's most recent endevour for HBO, "Generation Kill". While it wasn't as universally great as his afformentioned productions, it's definitely worth checking out. The mini-series follows an embedded Rolling Stone reporter as he tags along with the US Marine's 1st recon battalion in the early days of the 2003 Iraqi invasion.

This is not an action series, however. It's more of a portrait that depicts the realities of war, which don't always involve shooting shit up. Most of the time the characters just banter back and forth, making fun of each other, complaining about getting shit missions, slinging insults and riling each other up for when they finally get to "smoke some hajjis" (that means kill some arabs, for the slang impaired). Most of the dialog is along those lines and most of the characters are vaguely different iterations of the same persona, which is probably more the result of depicting things the way they really were as opposed to lazy writers not crafting unique characters. It's disturbing, funny, annoying, confusing, tense and boring all at the same time, but hey - that's life. In some respects "Generation Kill" is realistic to a fault. I wouldn't have minded if they spiced up a few things here and there for the sake of the screen.

At first I was like "how come these are all white dudes...they don't have any color in the Marine corps?", but then I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is an ex-marine and he said, "it's actually pretty realistic. That's the 1st recon batallion - you've gotta be able to swim to get on it and hardly any black people pass the swimming test". So yea...that's how realistic the series is.

Give this some time if you're into: the realities of war, potty humor, cultural commentary