HBO's Generation Kill.

"Generation Kill is in many ways the most straight-ahead, apolitical portrait yet of who's fighting our wars for us," writes Robert Abele; also in the LA Weekly, Matthew Fleischer talks with Evan Wright, who wrote the book the HBO series, premiering tomorrow, is based on.

The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley finds it "bold, uncompromising and oddly diffident. It maintains impeccable dignity even as it tracks a group of shamelessly and engagingly profane, coarse and irreverent marines, members of an elite reconnaissance battalion that spearheaded the invasion. The odyssey of these men from training tents in Kuwait to occupied Baghdad is laid out with brutal candor and without the aid of maudlin cinematography or emotive music."

Updated through 7/18.

"Despite the first episode's frequent crosstalk and restless camera, this isn't M*A*S*H, and these aren't guys you want to hang out with," warns Troy Patterson in Slate. "Generation Kill is too skeptical about authority to entertain neocons or red-meat nationalists and too depressing to delight a good liberal. It plays like it's been built for antisocial boys - armchair heroes in love with guns and in search of demented adventure."

"Shot in a vérité style, with the action unfolding from the Marines' point of view, Generation Kill is as much about our current 'Greatest Generation' as it is about the war itself," writes Brendan Bernhard in the New York Sun. "As Mr Wright states in his book, these men, often from broken homes, were 'raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer. For some, slain rapper Tupac is an American patriot whose writings are better known than the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows, and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.'"

David Simon and Ed Burns, co-creators of The Wire, are writers and producers for Generation Kill as well. And as Stuart Levine reports in Variety, HBO plans to work with Simon on Treme, "an hourlong drama concerning the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

Levine notes, too, more green and yellow lights from HBO, including: Boardwalk Express, "about the birth of organized crime in 1920s Atlantic City," exec produced by Martin Scorsese, Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson; a possible Sopranos movie, "if series creator David Chase is willing"; Washingtonienne, based on the novel by blogger Jessica Cutler, exec produced by Sarah Jessica Parker; and, hardly a surprise, a Sex and the City sequel.

Updates, 7/14: Wright's original Rolling Stone "pieces are punchy; in the book, the tone has been neutralized and the author's voice is not nearly as present. Fatally, it is entirely missing from the miniseries." Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker.

Takes at the House Next Door on the first episode: Jeremiah Kipp and Keith Uhlich.

Update, 7/18: "[T]he highest achievement of the miniseries is the way it unveils the disordered workings of the American military and the inevitable destruction of all objects in its path, including civilians whose only offense is to tend their sheep or drive down a road," writes Peter Maas in Slate. "With its $550 billion budget and 1.5 million troops, the military might seem a mechanized colossus of precision-guided violence, give or take a few bad apples and errant artillery shells. But if you have served in the military or written about it from the inside, you know that on the unit level it is filled with men and women of vastly different motivations and skills. The Marines in Generation Kill are intelligent and dimwitted, panicked, sensitive, racist, comic, homicidal, brave. It is a wonder when things go according to plan."

Posted by dwhudson at July 12, 2008 3:14 PM