Two confessions up front: One, I only watched the first episode; and two, that's because I had just finished watching Ken Burns documentary series on Vietnam. That made Medal of Honor seem like a stale Pop Tart served after eating a five-star filet mignon (sorry, that's the best I've got). I don't know how you can take something as dramatic as Sgt. Sylvester Antolak's one-man attack on a machine gun nest during the U.S. spearhead out of Anzio in WWII and make it feel unemotional, boring and meaningless. That was enough for me to give it a quick thumbs down and move on. The reenactment was unrealistic, slow-paced, poorly acted and plain boring. The panel of expert commentators provided surprisingly little insight into the events or the motivations of the participants, other than to fall back on the easy cliche of brothers fighting for one another, not for their country. The show even managed to make the comments from a modern Medal of Honor recipient look more like an NFL Films Top Ten football game review. The whole thing looked to me like cheap exploitation of some of the most profound human sacrifices. A shame, really.
Review of Medal of Honor
Medal of Honor
(2018)
A disappointingly superficial treatment of such compelling material
17 November 2018