LEWISTON – Before families sit down Sunday night to watch the first of a seven-part World War II saga, “The War,” they ought to have a talk about the film’s salty language and graphic violence.

The movie’s makers and public TV executives already have.

When the first episode of the epic documentary by Ken Burns airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, it will carry a TV-14 rating, unusual for the early hour.

It will also carry warnings from the network and a specially recorded message for Maine viewers from Burns’ partner, producer Lynn Novick.

Her message: The film is not suitable for all ages.

“This is tough stuff to watch,” said Lou Morin, a spokesman for MPBN who saw a one-hour excerpt of the film in August when it was screened at Rockland’s Strand Theatre. “There are dead bodies frozen in the snow and floating in the South Pacific.”

The national network people agree.

“Young people are certainly not the target audience,” said Carrie Johnson, PBS’ senior director for prime-time publicity. “The ideal is that parents will watch with children.”

The movie tells the story of the war through the reminiscences of folks in four communities: Sacramento, Calif.; Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn.

Critics are calling the film another masterpiece by Burns, who earned widespread acclaim for previous epics including “The Civil War” and “Baseball.”

Newsday critic Verne Gay called it a “miracle.”

“‘The War’ is magnificent and a triumph in every conceivable way,” Gay wrote.

Burns’ trademark techniques are all there: from the celebrity narration to his camera’s careful cruising of still photographs. There’s also the austere poetry of writer Geoffrey C. Ward.

Not everything is poetry, though. In fact, the salty descriptions of some of the vets have led PBS to send its affiliates two versions of the film, an unedited version and one with the profanity bleeped.

“We are sensitive to community standards,” Johnson said.

Most stations, including Maine Public Television, have chosen to run the unedited version, at least during its first telecast.

“We are going to air the unedited versions the first time through, the first time only,” Morin said.

Some stations have worried about the content because of complaints to the FCC over Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” broadcast unedited on Veterans’ Day in 2004.

“We had this discussion internally when we heard that there were four instances of (profane) language,” Morin said. “We had to have this meeting. What are we going to do here? If we air this, are we exposing ourselves to $325,000 fines as recently mandated? We had to have a talk about this.”

Together, they chose to go forward after examining the FCC’s decision, which found that the profanity in Spielberg’s World War II movie was not gratuitous and helped give a realistic portrayal of history.

“We decided that if the FCC was OK with a fictional depiction of World War II, then certainly they would have to give the same deference to an actual, factual documentary of World War II, where there are no actors,” Morin said.

For the visuals, the real thing can be tougher to watch than any fictional movie’s computer-created carnage.

Perhaps it is meant to. The brutality of war ought to be shocking.

In the early minutes of the series, narrator Keith David describes the unfathomable loss of life, estimated at 50 to 60 million.

“The second world war brought out the best and the worst in a generation,” he said. Images of dead soldiers and civilians slowly pass.

“So many people (died) in so many different places that the real number will never be known,” David says.