The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition)

The strengths of this doc are the eyewitness interview accounts + the flim archive material... lots of insight given into what was happening in civilian populations. The coverage of the campaigns themselves are spotty at best, unless it's something like a full hr devoted to the British in Burma. Narration is of mixed quality with respect to analysis. The doc is so skewed towards a British perspective, that one would never quite understand the scale of US involvment without prior info. Omaha beach is given much less time than Dutch and German resistance groups. I may be reading something unintended into it, but there almost seems to be a somewhat grudging less than grateful British viewpoint of American contributions... as if there was a measure of inconvenience involved. Kinda strange. For sure there will be British helmets and berets clearly visisible in most liberation victory parades footage. I wouldn't consider this to be THE definitive documentary, but rather a comprehensive collection of extremely interesting/informative interviews and film clips. Well worth watching, but a mixed and selectively edited viewing experience.

This 30th Anniversary Edition of The World at War has been reviewed extensively at this site, and I agree with the majority of reviewers that this series is one of the greatest documentaries about World War II. However, I have to complain that translations are often wanting. For example, in the two-part bonus to the series on Disc 10, entitled The Final Solution, there are long stretches of archival footage of German-language speeches and documentaries that contain NO TRANSLATION into English. These sections of the series are a void to those viewers who do not speak German. The World at War series is an English-language production, but this bonus documentary, as wonderful as it is in other respects, fails to reach most of its audience when translations are not provided. It is frustrating to see and hear these stretches of documentary that are inaccessible to those of us who do not understand German.

I watched this series on PBS in the seventies and was forever hooked! there has never been such a definitive work done on world war two as this, nor do I expect there will be in the near future. Sir Laurence Olivier's subperb narration guides you through almost every aspect of the most defining period of the twentith century.You can never grow weary of viewing this fine production as every time you view it, you will surley pick up on something you missed on the last viewing! All real, no phoney reenactments. A never ending history lesson.

Most of the other reviewers have covered the high points and All together the series does a decent job of covering many of the highlights of the second world war. However, the incredibly oppressive use of dubbing to add explosions along with other repetitive, unnecessary and imminently distracting and mind numbingly false sound effects proves to be extremely detrimental to the experience of watching this series. Dubbing is often done on old reel footage from Big Two, however in this case the experience is so overwhelmingly oppressive and poorly executed that it strays to the obscene. For example in one scene there is a dog attempting to jump into the interior of a bomber and the dubbing "experts" saw fit to add a loud whining sound on loop over the video.

As others have said, the history is good, the narration is illuminating but the sound is so bad that it detracts from the whole experience to teeth grating and ultimately the diminishing of the message with a overriding sense of falseness that this addition of sounds that are not only unnatural but dishonest to the material. Adding to the shoddy sound is the Journalistic nature of the discourse. This is to say that they are only talking about certain portions of the war that are of "interest" to them and many of the things they cover (or more often don't cover at all) leave a somewhat inaccurate impression of the actual war. I'd recommend the BBC history of world war II or simply "The War" much more over this collection.

This was how I learnt about the second world war, this series didn't romantisize the era as many movies and docos did (and still do) As this series was made in the early seventies many of the survivors were still alive to account for the events first hand. It is heavy viewing yet so well written and presented that I don't think this series will ever be obsolete.