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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