jimel98
I was flipping channels and came across this dreck a little less than 1/2 way through. I started to watch and within seconds found myself saying, "How did that...?" " When did....?" "That's not right." "I'm not genius or expert, but WHAT THE....?" and so forth.VERY few of the actors looked much like their characters as if the casting director simply said, "If they're white and male, feh, it works. Oh, but put a pair of glasses on that guy."As other reviews have mentioned, poetic license is to be expected to some degree and honestly, with that much of a timespan to cover and all that material, one has to be realistic enough to know that you can't include every detail or you'd end up with a movie almost as long as the war itself. It's just not going to happen. But with that in mind, isn't it in everyone's best interest to get what you ARE covering more than a LITTLE right?The History Channel has become a joke. What was once one of the most fascinating and informative channels for us history buffs has become a hodgepodge of reality crap shows. It's heartbreaking, but my anti-TV executive rants are common in my reviews, so, here's more evidence to back up my beliefs. When they DO an actual history show, I guess we shouldn't expect much more from them than this. And this stinker is now 4 years old. Sheesh, now I'm starting to cry.
jlthornb51
There are so many errors in this thing that it should not be considered a documentary at all. If it is indeed a documentary, it is the sloppiest one ever produced and an absolute travesty. The people associated with this should be ashamed and must be some of the laziest on earth. Any historian who came near it should hide for the next decade until the smoke clears from this because their reputations are totally mud. The film of a C-130 Hercules dropping German paratroopers over Poland in 1939 as American B-17's bomb Warsaw are a couple of examples of the jarring images used to misleadingly illustrate the narration. The narration and the commentary is okay and just that because the rest of the production is so slip-shod, haphazard, and downright trash. This was painful to watch and became impossible to view after the first 45 minutes. What a complete mess and insult to the intelligence of the viewers. Obviously, no one cared what they were doing when this abomination was thrown together and they felt accurate research was a waste of time. This junk is a waste of the audience's time and should be avoided. Stick to pawn shops and ice roads, "History" channel. Faking that stuff is what you do well!
JaniceShaww
Summarizing five years of global conflict into five hours is certainly a challenge, but this series is one for the books. I've never seen anything that blows past so many events that were critical to both wars. And the lack of attention to detail is amazing - I can understand things like guns and planes and uniforms, because it can be hard to locate and/or create them for the production. But this totally lost all credibility when portraying the Tehran conference, where Roosevelt is casually rotating his foot while sitting (um...how do you do that when wearing a leg brace?), and where wardrobe didn't even bother to have Churchill dressed in a uniform. And with young Hitler, not once did we get any sense of his early anger - he just appeared to be some displaced emo kid with a chip on his shoulder. A slapped together, D-grade effort at best.
Dennis Ver Mulm
This production is rife with oversimplification and inaccuracy. As previously noted, important events from both WWI and WWII are missing in their entirety, making it difficult, if not impossible, for an informed viewer to comprehend even the broad strokes of these significant world events. Film clips used to illustrate the narration are often not properly selected and, as a result, do not accurately portray the events being described. The time-line of events is frequently so out of order that it's impossible to establish a coherent chronology of events. Dramatization for effect is one thing, but the creators of this production have employed artistic license to the degree that this documentary is neither informative nor entertaining. The World Wars was obviously written by someone whose knowledge of history is solely a product of the American education system. The writer should have picked up and read a few history texts first! This was absolute garbage. I watched it once and was so steamed, I've deleted all the episodes from my DVR. This won't be part of my library, and I'd suggest that those who haven't seen it save six hours of their lives.
AD
