Anyone who sticks with the series to the end will experience an eight-hour tutorial in contemporary air warfare.
Photo: Apple TV+
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Now the two superstars are adding another World War spin-off with their new production “Masters of the Air”. The focus of this series is a bomb squad called the “Bloody Hundred,” which attacks mostly more, sometimes less, war-important targets in German and occupied cities shortly before “D-Day.” To start with Bremen, then Narvik, Regensburg, Münster, Berlin, and finally Normandy. And once again the battles are meticulously broken down into their individual parts in order to paint a battle portrait of both sober and emotional urgency. The directing team, led by Cary Joji Fukunaga (“True Detective”) and Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), is about fighter pilots who really existed.
Described from the off by the toothpick-chewing casual Major Buck Cleven (Austin Butler), they rain carpets of bombs on the German Reich, sometimes for entire episodes, until its cities lie in ruins. The “Masters of the Air” are experts in destruction. And the producer duo attaches great importance to describing this craft with great attention to detail. Anyone who stays through the series to the end will experience a kind of eight-hour tutorial in contemporary air warfare. From the daily marching orders to loading and praying, fighting and fleeing, killing and dying, to the repair, maintenance and restart of each decimated operational squadron, there are exact descriptions of military processes. Occasionally, for quarters of an hour, all you hear is radio traffic and chains of command or witness attack and defense formations.
Special effects give the sky battles something almost documentary. But author Orloff – after all, we are in the mass-compatible home cinema of Spielberg and Hanks – thickens the digitally animated craft of war with interpersonal drama, which the composer Blake Neely buries under violin carpets of symphonic pathos, as in the Pearl Harbor detour “The Pacific” – Just Hollywood. After all, the surface has to sparkle and shine, rage and roar to the point of total sensory overload.
Fortunately, however, the actors are allowed to search for truthfulness underneath. As robustly as the series presents its (naturally almost entirely male) personnel of the B-17 Flying Fortresses, the fears for attackers and those attacked on board or on the ground are also palpable. The audience also learns that Americans prefer targeted attacks during the day and the British prefer carpet bombings at night.
They also learn that both have devastating consequences, which at best only makes a rough distinction between National Socialist perpetrators, victims and followers. When the “Masters of the Air” come into contact with the enemy on the ground for the first time in the fourth part and even Germans – embodied by locals like Louis Hofmann or Jakob Diehl – appear, the series still manages not to make anyone want to become a gardener or vice versa. Two episodes are also dedicated to racism within the US Army.
The season finale borrows from John Sturges’ legendary 1963 war film “Broken Chains” and shows Allied pilots in German captivity. A Jewish deportation train on the outskirts makes the Holocaust tangible. An important series given the new Nazis who want to rule again.
Runs on Apple TV+
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