Time Out says
With movie star leads and supersized air combat sequences, this Spielberg-produced Apple TV+ series is a worthy successor to Band of Brothers
Callum Turner and Austin Butler bring A-list charisma to a mighty, melancholy nine-part war epic that charts the nightmarish experiences of American bomber crews during World War II. Like ‘Biggles’ with PTSD, it coolly unpicks the clichéd heroism of a ‘boy’s own’ story to show what it was really like.
If you’ve seen Band of Brothers – or its knottier, more convoluted HBO successor, The Pacific – you’ll know what to expect: enormous budgets, lavish visual effects, huge action sequences, and a degree of effort required to differentiate between a lot of blokes wearing khaki. Like both those series, it’s overseen on a cinematic scale by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks (though Hank’s Playtone co-founder Gary Goetzman is the showrunner here), and the sheer scale of the thing will humble all but the hugest tellies. It’s Memphis Belle times ten.
This time the focus falls on the early-twentysomething men of the US Air Forces’ 100th Bomb Group – aka ‘The Bloody Hundredth’ – a small army of clean-cut flyers who are invited to clamber aboard a B-17 bomber at a Norfolk airbase and drop their payload over Nazi Germany and occupied Europe – 25 times. The planes fly in tight formation, each bristling with enough machine guns to see off German fighters. At least, that’s the thinking. The reality – that they’re sitting ducks without fighter escorts – becomes clear after only a mission or two. ‘Is it always like that?’ a dazed crewman says, staggering out of his bullet-riddled machine. Yes. It really is.
The sheer scale of the thing will humble all but the hugest tellies
The aerial combat sequences are extraordinary. Nazi fighters whizz by in a blur, planes explode, debris floats serenely through the sky, smoke billows from stricken machines, and like their comrades who gaze on in horror, you find yourself praying for signs of parachutes. Just as you scour the Norfolk sky for returning bombers, hoping they all made it through.
It’s that kind of show: the mostly strong characterisation, thanks to John Orloff’s (another Band of Brothers alumnus) elegant adaptation of Donald L. Miller’s exhaustive history of the unit, invests you deeply in these young men’s fate. It’s genuinely gutting when they don’t make it home.
Sure, the sea of chocolate-coloured uniforms and Mae West life vests means there’s still a challenge keeping track of who’s who, but the casting is spot-on. Where Band of Brothers launched an army of future stars, Masters of the Air’s comes fully-formed. Oscar nominees Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan lend supercharged charisma as cool-as-ice pilots. Butler just exudes the stuff as the teetotal, sport-hating Major Gale ‘Buck’ Clevens, perhaps even offering a sense of what it might have been like to fly alongside Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, both real-life bomber airmen.
Major props, too, to Licorice Pizza’s Nate Mann as genius-level pilot Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal and Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa as a fighter pilot with the African-American Tuskegee Airmen. But it’s English actor Callum Turner who steals the show as Cleven’s hard-drinking, American-Irish buddy and fellow major, John ‘Bucky’ Egan. His arc is the show’s: a steely defiance and cockiness that’s reshaped into something much more resigned and world-weary as he watches so many friends and comrades go down in flames. Watch him and you’ll feel the true soul of this stirring but realistically melancholy epic.
The first two episodes of Masters of the Air stream on Apple TV+ Fri Jun 26. Subsequent episodes land weekly on Fridays.
Where was ‘Masters of the Air’ filmed? The real life filming locations behind Steven Spielberg’s epic on Apple TV+.