Customer Reviews
Advance to contact but with much advancing and little contact - By: Mr. Tristan Martin, 22 Feb 2010 
Based on Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright's non fiction book of the same name, Generation Kill follows a U.S. Marine Recon unit during the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq. For many, this series will get noticed because it is produced & co-written by David Simons & Ed Burns, creators of the superb HBO drama series The Wire.
Is it in the same league as The Wire? No but then again, hardly anything else is. Is it as good as the book? No - adaptions rarely are but this does follow the book quite closely. Is this anything like the Spielberg produced World War II drama series Band of Brothers? No, this focuses much less on the intense combat that Band of Brothers captured so well, instead taking much more time over the characters & the chain of command. Is this still worth watching? Absolutely.
Almost gutting the book entirely of actual scenes of, you know, war, Generation Kill still features scenes of disturbing violence that are viewed from a more emotional (not sentimental) perspective: the bombing of an Iraqi village, which the marines decide not to invade as alll they can see are women & children, the shooting dead of civilians at military checkpoints, the attempt to avoid driving over a dismembered head & instead driving over the decapitated body ("Goddammit - you just can't win.") These are the kinds of incidents that Generation Kill illustrates. One almost feels as if the producers decided that to portray anything approximating actual combat in a war drama series would be just too vulgar & obvious.
This detachment & lack of bloody action will no doubt turn some viewers off who came expecting explosions & cries of "frag out!" Others will simply find this series just too dry & lacking in a forceful narrative drive; the invasion of Iraq, as depicted in Generation Kill, mostly involved a lot of driving, singing songs in Humvees, staring out the window via a scoped rifle & trying to write "USA" in the sand with your own urine. Very few people get shot & a lot of time is spent on periods of much inactivity.
Like I said, this is not for everyone but by the end it is pulled together by the strong, well drawn characters, the off-the-cuff comments ("Two weeks ago, he was a student in Syria. He didn't become a jihadi until we invaded.") & the black humour. For what it's worth, my wife, who dislikes screen violence & who loved The Wire, much preferred Band of Brothers to Generation Kill. So did I but this was still an interesting, rather than a dramatic series.
Amazing - By: A Twig, 11 Feb 2010 
Incredibly realistic when compared to a lot of the OTT dramas around these days, interesting so many of the original Marines are acting in this. Definitely a good buy. Wish there were more!
killing in the name of....yet again. - By: Topher, 25 Jan 2010 
The trailer is enough to see that this is yet more glorification of those brainwashed by the controllers to murder innocent people in the name of oil & the sickening spread of consumerism & mindless capitalism. Well praise the lord & god bless such brave souls hey. peace is nothing more than an interval bewteen wars as long as we continue to follow the propaganda machines
Reality Bites - By: C. Paterson, 15 Jan 2010 From David Simon it is pretty much what I expected. Realism without resorting to cliched cliffhanging endings & there is nothing in here that you think wouldn't or couldn't happen in (real) life. Although some scenes may be shocking to the uninitiated, there is no needless gratuitous violence, there is no brave dying by a minor character, no love scenes or anything overtly sexual. It's just real & funny & no gung-ho American troops saving (or destroying) the world. They are just going about their jobs, trying to work with competent & incompetent superiors (like any other job) & ultimately just hoping to survive, not through luck but through there training & their own confidence in each other.
Thoroughly recommended but unfortunately (or thankfully)may not be to everyones taste.
Generation Thrill - By: RJ Sessions, 15 Jan 2010 Just finished watching the box set. Watched alll of them in one weekend. Provides a good insight into what the Marines went through. Having found the level of officer bashing a little too hard to believe I went out obtained a copy of Nate Flick's 'One Bullet Away' & read through that. This dispels some of the issues & I would highly recomend the book as an accompanyment to the DVD.
