'Masters of the Air': A Spoiler-Free Review
Last week I wrote about my enthusiasm for the television genre derisively nicknamed "Dad TV," but which is getting more popular all the time. It has many forms, action, comedy, drama, SciFi, but essentially consists of shows with strong male characters doing strong male character things. Protecting those who need it. Fighting those who deserve it. Being positive representations of masculinity and demonstrating the qualities most men aspire to.
Well it doesn't get any more "Dad," "T" or "V" than watching the stories of the real life men who saved the world by slaughtering fucking Nazis and their allies in the other Axis Powers by the thousands. So when it was announced that the production companies owned by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman that brought us Band of Brothers - the best limited series of all time - and The Pacific, which focused on the Marines in during their "Island Hopping" campaign, were turning their attention to the crews who flew bombing missions over Europe, you can be damned certain this Boomer was all the way in on Masters of the Air.
The first two of nine episodes dropped this weekend on Apple+. As a primer, I caught a recent episode of my go-to British WWII podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, Ordinarily, their shows have titles like "The Dambusters Raid, Part 4" or "The Life of Rommel." But this one featured series writer John Orloff. He wrote a couple of episodes of Band of Brothers and despite the fact he decided after that he was done with WWII stuff, Hanks approached him and asked him to give this a shot. Which he points out was much harder because with BoB there was source material to work with. Not just the Stephen Ambrose bestseller, but the actual members of Easy Company. He could simply call up Dick Winters and ask him what happened at a particular moment and how he felt about it and put that onto the page. This required mountains of research. Notebooks filled with names, dates, locations, missions, battles, the living and the dying. He handed it to Hanks and fully 10 years later, it's finally on the screen.
The first thing that hits you watching this is the sheer scale of the undertaking. Orloff told the podcast hosts that literally thousands of people worked on it. And that at one point he asked the costume designer how many fittings she did and she answered she'd lost count at 3,000. Whereas BoB changes locations, it mostly takes place on dry land and involves a fairly manageable group of recurring characters. Same with The Pacific, except it involved a lot of filming on the ocean. Which, if you've heard anything about Spielberg trying to make Jaws, is a nightmare from a production standpoint. MotA is harder still, recreating takeoffs, aerial combat, bombing runs and landings. Although that last part didn't happen nearly enough. And the show gives you a feel for how badly the odds were stacked against the men who climbed aboard the B-17 Flying Fortresses, strapped themselves in, and flew toward the danger.
The thing about all the work that goes into making a sprawling, epic TV series is that it doesn't always end up on the screen. Amazon's Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the most expensive show ever filmed. And to me it looks like the kind of movie you make to get into film school. Shitty CGI. Cheap, amateurish costumes and make up. Bland, one-note characters, badly acted. But with Masters, you see where all those man hours, labor, care and effort went. Right down to the fact the producers took great pains to make it as historically accurate as possible. They tracked every B-17 in every formation by computer so that, when a certain plane gets hit, they have the right one in the right place in the formation, getting hit at the right time, with the precise amount of damage it got in real life.
The strongest element so far is, not surprisingly, the flight sequences. You get a true sense of the physics of these planes. How small they seem on the inside when you get a crew of 10 in there. Like stuffing 10 grown men and thousands of pounds of ordinance into a school bus. How hard they were to maintain. The total vulnerability of everyone on board when one of Hermann Goring's goose-stepping assholes strafed their fuselage and engines. Or when shards of shrapnel come tearing through the cabin like ninja stars. At times, it's stunning. Some of the best and (I assume) best combat scenes ever committed to film. And I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say they promise to grow in scale exponentially. Later in the war there was one raid over Berlin that took 3 hours from the first plane to the last.
As far as the characters, it's still a work in progress. Like with Hanks, Spielberg and Goetzman's other shows I mentioned, there's a lot of people to keep track of. And it can take a few episodes before you really get familiar with them. Right now there's a lot of guys with similar names, similar faces, and similar mustaches. And believe me, this show's mustache game is strong.
If I have a complaint, it's that it does lapse into trope territory every now and again. The stereotype of the wiseass Masshole with a terrible Boston accent. The obligatory dance party scene with a Big Band playing period music. The pilot saying goodbye to the plucky, impossibly attractive dame before he goes off on a mission, neither knowing if he'll be back. Which I suppose can't be avoided in a story like this.
What can be avoided is a personal beef of mine. And it is how pretty much every American movie or TV show about the war depicts the Brits as sniffy, condescending, supercillious, upper crust twits. The magnificent bastards held the Krauts at bay all by themselves while their cities were being bombed every night and we were still saying we have no skin in the game. But in shows like this, they're always pretentious, tea-sipping pussies who'll go down with the first punch. We owe these guys and they deserve better.
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Those flaws aside, it's so far, so good. The Dad TV is strong with this one. And two episodes in, I'm giving it an 85% on Thorntomatoes. Stay tuned as I think it's only going to get better.