That said, very few individuals in this narrative are.
THE LONG ROAD HOME SEASON 1 EPISODE 7 SERIES
Unfortunately the scenes set at Fort Hood are generic at best and predictable at worst.Īnd though the limited series makes some attempts at addressing what it might have felt like for Iraqis to live through the invasion and the subsequent waves of bloodshed, the locals are not fully developed as characters. A scene of a wife at home sewing a 1st Division flag while swelling music plays could have had real psychological impact, had the drama’s non-combat moments developed any kind of sustained depth. But in those scenes, the miniseries’ clunky, cliche-ridden dialogue is uninterrupted by flying bullets or life-or-death decisions.Īt times, “The Long Road Home” comes very close to coming off as propaganda, for either the Army or a narrowly defined vision of America. The desire to incorporate scenes of military families going through the worst stress of their lives is a laudable one. Characterization is not the strong suit of “The Long Road Home,” but the actors do their level best, and directors Phil Abraham and Mikael Salomon excel at depicting the camaraderie of the soldiers as well as the chaos that envelops them at several key moments.īut “The Long Road Home” could have trimmed its overlong running time by cutting out all the home-front storylines.
In moments like those, “The Long Road Home” brings to mind generally superior (and more expensive) dramas such as “The Pacific,” “Band of Brothers” and “Generation Kill.” The difference between this NatGeo production and those HBO dramas is that in “Long Road,” many of the protagonists - all those young and frightened or older and grizzled faces beneath the helmets - are not often all that well-defined, either before or during the battle.
THE LONG ROAD HOME SEASON 1 EPISODE 7 FULL
“The Long Road Home” often does an excellent job of putting the viewer into the boots of individual soldiers: What do you do when a child picks up a gun and points it at you? What happens after a truck full of mostly untested soldiers runs into engine trouble without any backup even remotely nearby? What’s it like to ride in a Humvee or a tank with the dead body of a soldier who had been joking around just an hour before? How does a soldier choose a decisive path forward when he is reeling from an onslaught of deaths and injuries around him?
Intelligent and well-intentioned officers kept making reasonable plans to save their troops, but each operation kept getting, as a grunt might say, FUBAR. Events continued to spiral as various convoys sent to save the initial platoon, which was pinned down, ran into bloody and effective opposition. Once in Iraq, division personnel weren’t even done unpacking their gear before things went wrong.
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