With these military shows, I'm always on the lookout for MREs and this episode was chock full of them. They're all over the place - in tents, vehicles, being loaded on trucks, being eaten, etc."Generation Kill" follows the highly trained Marines of Recon Battalion through the first 40 days of the Iraq war. Based on Evan Wright's acclaimed 2004 non-fiction book of the same name, Generation Kill is a seven-part miniseries that focuses on the first 40 days of the Iraq war, a.k.a. "Operation Iraqi Freedom," through the eyes and actions of a group of elite U.S. First Recon Marines.
While offering vivid and unvarnished portraits of the actual Marines who rode alongside Wright (an embedded journalist working for Rolling Stone magazine) for two months starting in March 2003, Generation Kill provides a gritty, uncompromising account of the collective forces that guided these highly-trained Marines across a barren landscape, and against an unknowable enemy, in a military initiative designed to liberate the Iraqi populace from Saddam Hussein.
But a couple of things stuck out for me:
First, here are a couple of the standard scenes with cases of MREs all over:
But then there was a quick close-up of the cases in one scene:
Notice the white sticker/barcode on that one case? That's an RFID tag. The funny thing is, they didn't start using the RFID tags until around 2006...and this series is supposed to be happening in 2003. I know I'm being super-nitpicky but it just stuck out for me.
I didn't notice it at the time, but take another look at the other cases in that picture above. Notice how that one case with white tag looks different than the other cases around it. While I was watching the series, I originally thought maybe the producers worked out a deal with the DoD to get some cases of MREs for the show. But now that I see this picture, it looks to me like they have one legitimate case of MREs (from 2006+) and then a whole bunch of other cases their prop department probably made up...and they didn't do a good job of matching up the fonts on the fake cases.
That would explain this next pic:
When I first saw this, I couldn't figure out what was beside the guy. It was obviously supposed to be an MRE box but the fonts looked all wrong. Now it looks like it was just one of the fake MRE cases.
Nitpicking aside, I thought it was a pretty good first episode - can't wait to see the rest.
