Band of Brothers (2012)

Image credit: Band of Brothers: Keith Hamshere

'BROTHERS GRIM' A shell-shocked Wahlberg is the most familiar actor in the cast

Episode directors range from David Nutter (''The X-Files'' and the upcoming ''Smallville'') for the fourth segment to Hanks himself on the fifth. Spreading out the assignments results in wildly different tones. There's hokey poignancy in part 3, directed by Mikael Salomon: In a scene in which a soldier (Scott Grimes) picks up his clothes from a French laundress, she asks him to take back some unclaimed loads, and he slowly (and we immediately, recognizing a blast of incoming melodrama) realizes these garments belong to men who've died.

Spielberg and Hanks attempt an admirable fusion: They want to combine the documentary-style realism that made ''Private Ryan'' so compelling (using the freedom of HBO to show the atrocious gore of war), while also invoking the vivid male-bonding camaraderie of older WWII films like John Ford's ''They Were Expendable'' (1945) and Sam Fuller's ''The Big Red One'' (1980). The result is an inevitable artistic hodgepodge: a $125 million project whose realism depends on conveying confusion, yet whose drama requires that we identify with precisely delineated protagonists. Often, these objectives cancel each other out.

Stick with ''Brothers,'' however, and slowly, the characters played by Wahlberg, Lewis, and Livingston take on full-bodied resonance. While ''SNL'''s Jimmy Fallon gets lost in the crowd during a cameo in hour 5, Colin Hanks (''Roswell'') acquits himself extremely well as a baby-faced West Point grad thrown into combat in hour 8. In the seventh hour, entitled ''The Breaking Point,'' director David Frankel has the visual advantage of shooting the sooty soldiers against stark white snow, and writer Graham Yost (''Speed'') gives Wahlberg an excellent voice-over narration about the paratroopers' exhaustion and fear. It's at moments like these that ''Band of Brothers'' rises above the current pervasiveness of its subject to take on the gravity of reconstructed history as art.