Before we talk about Masters of the Air, we must first discuss other two Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg Playtone World War II epics: Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Both shows are towering masterpieces in storytelling, cinematography, and acting performances. As a person who has studied World War II extensively, I consider these two shows some of the most authentic and impactful stories about the war ever created. I have watched those series multiple times, and still get chills from some of the scenes.
It is therefore inevitable that Masters of the Air, which covers the strategic bombing campaign of Germany, would be compared to those two shows. It shares more than just a production company with its predecessors. The structure, tone, and style are all similar. However, that is where the similarities end. To state the obvious, air warfare is vastly different than land combat. Masters of the Air is not the same kind of story as Band of Brothers or the Pacific.
Band of Brothers was about leadership and the bonds that form among a company of infantry men. The Pacific was about the psychological impact on the Marines that slogged through one horrific battle after another. Masters of the Air was always going to be less visceral and more intellectual. Air warfare lacks the physicality of ground combat. It is mostly planning and boredom, punctuated with brief moments of terror. There is fertile ground for storytelling here. For example, there was a lot of debate among US and UK brass as to how to do strategic bombing. Moreover, bombing runs consume an enormous amount of planning and preparation.
This is exactly where Masters of the Air flies off course. Rather than embracing its differences, it tries to recreate Band of Brothers and the Pacific. This was a mistake. There was a chance to tell a different kind of story. Something more intelligent. A story about the deadly lessons aircrews learned fighting the Luftwaffe. A story about tactics, planes, and theories, all of which played an important role in air warfare at this time. A story about the existential dread the aircrews faced as they flew out over the English Channel. Instead, Masters of the Air grounds its main characters quickly, keeps them stuck inside a prisoner of war camp, and stuffs the interstitial with incompletely developed characters and drab speeches about duty and honor.
Nevertheless, Masters of the Air is still an enjoyable show. The story of the Bloody Hundredth is painful to watch. The battle scenes are sufficiently terrifying. The recreation of the B-17 Flying Fortress is (mostly) well done. There is plenty of heart-pounding arial combat action that is on par with Roland Emmerich’s World War II epic Midway. The liberation scenes in the final episode are rousing and patriotic. I was never bored.
I was not exactly engaged either. The actor’s performances are competent, but unremarkable. None of them even come close to the performances of Daiman Lewis, Ron Livingston, and Michael Cudlitz in Band of Brothers or James Badge Dale, Joseph Mazzello, and Rami Malek in the Pacific. The two leading actors in Master, Austin Butler and Callum Turner, never fully own their characters. Furthermore, Butler’s “Elvis voice” and Turner’s odd, drunken, belligerence are distracting. The emotion is just not there.
The culmination of the show has the main characters stuck in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp. The camp seemed absolutely luxurious compared to what other Nazi prisoners endured. This is contrasted with some earnest lectures about “getting the job done” back in England. The Tuskegee airmen are thrown into the mix late in Episode 8 but are given little to do but get shot down and join the fun at the POW camp. There are a few moments of racial tension, but that is quickly waved away.
Another huge miss in Masters is how non-American airmen are depicted. The show has an egregiously American-centric view of everything. That is a forgivable sin. However, Masters not only diminishes the contributions of the British, but it also belittles them in the process. The show depicts British airmen as stiff, insensitive, and arrogant. There are zero scenes with German airmen, or any other country for that matter.
Another area where Masters dropped the ball was how it handled the concentration camps. There is no mention of the camps in the first eight episodes. The final episode spends sizable runtime on a side story with a Jewish character visiting one of the camps. This storyline felt bolted on merely for shock value. It was almost as if a writer late in the script development process said, “hey guys, we got to get a death camp scene in here,” and everybody in the writer’s room groaned. This late entry into the series has the unintended effect of diminishing the entire issue, which I do not think the director intended. Nevertheless, the storyline is still touching and impactful, even if it feels a bit tacked on.
Masters is mostly historically accurate, with a few notable misses. For example, by 1944, all new B-17s were the G variant (B-17G) which added dual gun turret to the nose. The new B-17s shown in the latter episodes of Masters are all still B-17Fs (which had a single, nosecone mounted gun.) This may seem minor, but to WWII nerds like me it is irritating. Moreover, we only get a handful of glances at P-51s. There are no P-38s, P-47s, or Spitfires anywhere. That was sad. And while I am griping, we never see any German planes in any detail. Even the uneven 2012 movie Red Tails gave us some stirring scenes with an ME-262 (the first jet fighter in the world and an absolute menace when Germany used them properly.) In a show like this, the planes are characters. I tuned in to see planes, not Clark Gable mustaches.
After watching Masters, I thought about The Pacific. There is a chilling scene at the end of episode 9 (the second-to-last episode) that really stuck with me. The Marines are resting in the sun overlooking a picturesque Pacific Ocean. They are exhausted from the horrific battle of Okinawa. Their lieutenant walks past and chuckles about some kind of new bomb that will end the war. We then pan over to a massive squadron of B-29s flying overhead. It is a beautiful, chilling, scene full of contradicting emotions and visuals. I still get a tingle down my spine when I think about that scene. It is one of the many brilliantly constructed moments in The Pacific.
Master of the Air desperately tried to create similar scenes. They never clicked.
Again, Masters of the Air is not bad. It is incredibly well made and tells an engaging, albeit plain story. However, when it is placed alongside Band of Brothers and the Pacific, it is clearly the weakest of the three. Perhaps if Masters spent a bit more time in the air, a little less time on the ground, talking about how bad it is in the air, it could have rivaled its predecessors more effectively.
