At this point in Ken Burns' long documentary-miniseries career, it's unclear whether his unwillingness to vary his style even one iota represents a boldness of vision, or a paucity of one. Maybe the answer varies depending on the subject. Poring over battlefield photographs and reading aloud from soldiers' correspondence made sense for The Civil War, where fresh images and voices brought musty old archives to life, and it even worked for Baseball, which spanned the 20th century and used the words of sportswriters and popular songs to revive a story as familiar as scripture. But as with the faltering Jazz—which suffered from Burns' narrow interest in a bottomless subject—his latest docu-mini, The War, rams into a wall, and that wall is named Ken Burns.
Burns' best idea for The War is also his worst. In keeping with his obsessive focus on Americana, Burns decides to tell the story of World War II through the eyes of four American towns—one in California, one in Alabama, one in Minnesota, and one in Connecticut—and largely through the words of the residents who fought and the relatives they left behind. The homefront anecdotes show a side of wartime that the popular media covered only shallowly at the time and all but ignored afterward, while the harrowing combat descriptions from local veterans leave no doubt that war can turn civilized men into wild beasts, acting out of raw fear and rage. Burns highlights the chasm between a nation largely untouched by actual explosions and gunfire, and the citizens plunged into the thick of it overseas.
The problem is that World War II is such a big subject that Burns' approach alone can't really cover it. (For starters, it ignores the massive contributions and sacrifices made by other countries.) So Burns fills in the gaps with maps and narration, and as the war wears on, he spends more and more time on troop positions and strategy, because unless viewers know why Burns' interviewees were in Belgium or Iwo Jima, their stories don't make much sense. The War is undeniably compelling viewing, littered with astonishing untold stories and steeped in well-laid-out history. But too much of it is textbook Burns, which feels too much like, well, reading a textbook.
Key features: A predictably earnest commentary track by Burns and his partner Lynn Novick, plus additional interviews and deleted scenes.