Sunday, January 28, 2024

Masters of the Air Review: Spielberg and Hanks Bring Us Back To World War II

 

Steven Spielberg would no doubt be comfortable if he directed a limited series – TV movies, including the classic Duel, are where he made his bones. But he has spent the last quarter century making cinematic masterpiece after masterpiece which is where we need him.

In a sense that’s probably for the best – Spielberg has not only been one of our greatest filmmakers but one of the most optimistic ones: I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films he’s made that don’t have some kind of uplifting or optimistic message at their core. In another sense, he has been exactly where we need him – being at the center of producing along with his comrade-in-arms Tom Hankes some of the greatest limited series of the past quarter of century, the lion’s share of them for HBO.

When limited series were still mini-series, they were essentially the province of HBO and Spielberg and Hanks collaborated not merely some of the very best but the most unique of the era of Peak TV. From the Earth to The Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific are outliers from so much what has made the Golden Age of television what it is not merely because they are stories of history but because they have a sense of idealism that almost all of the television of the era has lacked. It’s not that the men of Easy Company or the Founding Fathers are not cynical or pessimistic; it’s that there a sense of unity and camaraderie that is absent from almost every major work on TV that has been highlighted in the era of Peak TV. There is an irony that in the decade of the peak production of these series HBO was leading the revolution with such cynical shows about the death of the American Dream such as The Sopranos and The Wire and the bloodiness that we see in Deadwood. It’s only in the latter series that we see the idea of unifying towards a common goal against overwhelming forces.

Now if you were a cynical person, like much of the Gen Z or the Internet is, you could argue that so much of the work of Spielberg and Hanks on HBO is about promoting the idea of American exceptionalism, which is nonsense. The Continental Congress, the soldiers in World War II and the astronauts of the Apollo missions are not the least interested in some idea of patriotism or the idea of Americanism. They are only interested in the men next to them and trying to survive until the next day. They don’t have the benefit of knowing they’re living through history, and they don’t care how they’ll be judged. They just want to live to see tomorrow and if they’re lucky, the next day.

Considering the amount of lavish praise that was deservedly lauded to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Masters of the Air their latest collaboration was going to be one of the most anticipated series of 2024. Wanting to get in on the ground floor of something (I did not see either of the previous series when they first aired on HBO) I decided to watch the first two episodes when they dropped on Apple TV this weekend. Based on them, it’s clear the hype and praise is more than merited.

The first two sagas looked at World War II from the perspective of the men on the ground: Band of Brothers involved the march across Europe; the Pacific the war against Asia. Masters of the Air, which is in a sense completing a trilogy, looks at it from the perspective of the bombing pilots of the 8th Air Force which led B-19s (‘Flying Fortresses’ as they were known) on the first ever precision bombing raids. The squadron we follow is called the ‘Bloody Hundredth’, not for the carnage they inflict on the Nazis but because of the high casualty rate they undergo. It’s clear from the opening teaser just how dangerous these missions are – and that’s assuming you can get off the ground in the first place, something that is never a done deal.

Indeed many of the most suspenseful scenes in the first two episodes involve the process of just getting off the ground. When you see all of the steps that they have to go through just before they can take off – including manually pumping their engines to start them – you will count your lucky stars every time you flight across county managed to take off with a ten minute delay. The members of the squadron are very aware that they are risking death every time they take off. They also know that the daylight bombing that they are carrying out – as opposed to the nighttime bombing that the RAF is doing and openly brags to the Americans as superior – is suicidal. It’s not just that if you miss your target by a few degrees you could end up in the middle of a dogfight – which is exactly what we see happen in the first episode. It’s that every aspect of the flight seems more dangerous even if things go absolutely perfectly and as any soldier can tell you, battle plans go FUBAR the moment you enter enemy airspace. There’s a reason that every time the pilots every time they have their heavy breakfast call their meals ‘the Last Supper.” They know all too well for some of them it will be.

The two leads of Masters of the Air are two friends from flight school: John ‘Bucky’ Egan (Callum Turner) and Gale ‘Buck’ Claven (Austin Butler). (There’s a story behind this but it’s irrelevant.) Buck gets to combat first and is told  by his CO not to tell the new recruits what will happen. “They’ll find out for themselves.” Bucky, when he gets to war, does find out very quickly in a bombing mission that ends up being scrubbed because of fog. This unsuccessful mission ends up with three planes being shot down and we see all three of them go down in spectacular gore.

Bucky is the cocky one of the group going into the battle but when he comes back he demands to know why his friend didn’t tell him. The next day he is so dismayed that he gets drunk and numbed that he orders a bewildered lieutenant to punch him so he can feel something. When he has a meeting with new CO he’s asked if he’s hungover. “That’ll happen later today,” he says before he’s demoted.

Though we spend much of the first two episode following the two friends, the narrator of the story is Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) a navigator who is airsick on an almost regular basis. Crosby has a self-deprecating humor to him, particularly when his own vomit leads him to think he’s been hit by a bullet. He ends up getting promoted to navigator on a critical mission when the lead falls horribly ill.

As good as the acting is (Butler and Turner have clearly modeled their performances off such matinee idols of the era), Masters of the Air is, like the first two series in the trilogy, more about the cast as an ensemble then the whole. That would not normally be ideal for a limited series but in these works (and similarly From the Earth to the Moon ) it works in the show’s favor because these series are not about the individual but the common goal. I don’t agree with the label that was placed on those of this era as The Greatest Generation (a label that came, as we all know, in part because of the massive success of Saving Private Ryan) but a part of me can not help but admire the men who in Masters of the Air with a certainty that my generation and certainly not this one could do anything like the things we see them do in the first two episodes. I don’t just mean risk their lives in airplanes that are so often held together with little more than glue and prayers; I mean agree to work togethers towards a common goal. So much of the last half century has been built more on the idea of individualism and against any kind of community that the idea of working together on anything seems laughable.

I acknowledge that they are all white men and the hypocrisy of this fact of fighting racism abroad while ignoring it at home, but that is not the fault of the soldiers but the generals and the Commander-in-Chief. Does that make their fighting and their deaths – which the series goes to great lengths to show how painful and agonizing they could be – any less significant? During the second episode Bucky tells his friend that he wants to take on the job of writing the letters of the men who die in his squadron. “It’ll mean something more coming from someone who served with them,” he tells Buck. Now we have entire generations who look on not only the soldiers but the families left behind as little more than tools in the partisan culture war, with their lives being little more than tools in the battle of the military industrial complex. These days the Second World War itself is being shown by people on both sides as just another sign of American hypocrisy by people whose idea of getting together for a cause is liking a hashtag.

I imagine there will be some who look at Master of the Air as a glorification of combat, the same way that Truffaut once said it was impossible to make a true anti-war movie because all movies make war look glorious. That was certainly not true of Saving Private Ryan, it wasn’t true of Band of Brothers or The Pacific, and it sure isn’t of the first two episodes of Masters of the Air. What these series remind us is of the quotes of William Sherman who proceeded his famous three word quote with the following: “War is cruelty and you can not refine it. Its glories are all moonshine.” He also realized something that the members of the Bloody Hundredth know all too well. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” As the series begins Buck knows this when he realizes that this war is going to be a long, hard road. For whatever reason these men joined up, they very quickly find out they are not fighting for the Stars and Stripes, mom and Apple Pie, or to spread democracy. They are fighting for the men flying alongside them, who may be gone when they go into battle and the longer it goes on, they probably will be. They’re doing it so they don’t have to write as many letters to the ones left behind.

I realize I may have strayed from the point of the overall quality of Masters of the Air and ranged somewhat into pontificating. But that’s the thing about the kind of work that Spielberg has always done and is true even when he is merely producing. When you see the work you marvel at the splendor of the technical aspects, the level of the performances and the quality of the work as a whole. When you’re done, you begin to ask yourself questions about what you’ve seen and the lessons that can be learned from the past today. Peak TV does that at its best, and that’s why there’s a place for series like this as much as there is for Succession. Sometimes you need idealism in your Peak TV too.

My score: 4.75 stars.

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