HBO's 'Generation Kill' is compelling TV

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The first hour of HBO's "Generation Kill" is sheer chaos. You won't be able to figure out who all the characters are and what's going on. You won't even be able to understand a lot of what's being said because it's military jargon that's never explained.

That confusion is completely intentional. It's part of telling this story of a group of Marines who were the tip of the spear in the invasion of Iraq — a compelling adaptation of Evan Wright's best-selling book about the Marines 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, with whom the Rolling Stone reporter was embedded.

And out of the confusion of the first hour (Sunday, 10 p.m., HBO) emerges an amazing, seven-hour miniseries that's unflinching in its portrayal of young men who go from boredom to extreme peril as they travel from Kuwait to Baghdad, often behind enemy lines.

"We make you work, but at the end, there's more of a payoff than doing TV the old way," said David Simon, who knows a lot about delivering challenging TV that pays off for viewers — he was one of the creators/writers/executive producers of HBO's "The Wire."

"I actually give viewers and readers a great deal of credit that if they want to enter a world, they will be willing to tolerate a certain amount of confusion as long as some core values and some core elements of the story are propelled forward," Simon said.

If it's in fits and starts, well, so was the war itself. This is not an effort to retell the first 40 days from the perspective of those in command of the American forces. "Generation Kill" looks at it from the perspective of a relatively small group of men on the front lines.

"I had a very myopic view of what was going on," said Eric Kocher, one of the Marines portrayed in the miniseries. "I mean, even after reading Evan's book, it kind of brought light to a lot of things that I didn't see. I got my five-man team. That's my little world. That's everything I saw."

"The war is a backdrop to the focus on relationships between Marines in this movie," said Wright, who's a writer/producer/consultant on the adaptation of his book.

Unlike a lot of journalists who were embedded sort of at the tail end of the various combat forces, Wright was up front with the Marines on reconnaissance. Like the troops, he had no idea what was going to happen when he arrived in Iraq.

"I wasn't sure there was going to be a shooting war," he said. "When I got into that Humvee, even as we set off across the border, I didn't know if we would ever encounter anything."

But he knew he had a story just by observing the Marines interact with each other.