Special Features:
Documentary: We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company  �  Ron Livingston's Video Diaries  �  The Making Band of Brothers

It is amazing what a few years can do. HBO has been doing good things for a while, but the rise of the Sopranos has really elevated the channel to a new level. Band of Brothers is one of the channels crowning achievement. HBO is now a great place to go for cutting edge material. (I can't wait for the Six Feet Under - Season One DVD set in 02/2003)

Band of Brothers owes a lot to Saving Private Ryan in both its look and feel, but that is probably a good thing. (Not unexpected with Spielberg and Hanks acting as producers) Where Band of Brothers surpasses Saving Private Ryan is that it never gets too sentimental and it doesn't have any of the goofball story elements that Ryan sometimes fell back on. Each episode has a different director (actually two directors handled two episodes) and many of the episodes either focus on or are told by different men in Easy Company. As with any war movie that has a huge ensemble cast it can be difficult to tell each of the characters apart, but after a couple of episodes this problem dissipates. (One of the best things about the DVD set is that you don't have to wait a week in between each episode which keeps the characters and story a little more fresh in one's mind)

War movies have always been a great vehicle for up and coming actors to show their stuff and Band of Brothers is no exception. I especially liked Damian Winters as Major Richard Winters and Frank John Hughes as Sgt. William 'Wild Bill' Guarnere.

Audio and video quality on these discs is outstanding. The cinematography uses the same washed out, muted color scheme as Private Ryan and it is wonderfully reproduced. On the rare occasion that the picture was a little soft and contained a few artifacts it never became distracting. Great audio tracks on all of the episodes, but the Bastonge episode really stands out.

I really would have loved to have had a directors commentary on each of the episodes, but I guess that is too much to even hope for on a mini series like this. The three documentaries that were included were all outstanding. I especially liked the Ron Livingston video diaries (I wish they were actually a little longer).

As with the Soprano's DVD sets this is a must own and can be picked up at significant discounts on line so you have no excuse not to pick it up.