By Caryn JamesFeatures correspondent
AppleTV+Apple TV+’s World War Two series, created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and starring Austin Butler and Callum Turner, is “clunky” in places but reckons with the moral and emotional cost of war.
In a typically intense scene in Masters of the Air, we are put in the midst of a US bombing mission over Nazi Germany. With dozens of other planes falling from the sky and one of their own engines on fire, a fighter plane’s co-pilot thinks it is time to parachute out. The pilot, Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler) grabs him by the arm and yells, “We’re going to sit here and take it! You hear me? We’re going to sit here and take it!”
That scene reveals what is gripping and also what is creaky in the much-hyped series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Masters of the Air is a big old-fashioned war drama, glossed up with dazzling special effects and stocked with some of today’s hottest young actors. It is also full of the kind of earnest, clunky dialogue and swaggering heroes familiar from classic war movies going back to the 1940s.
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That is just what the show has always promised to be, though: an instalment in a franchise. It completes the Spielberg-Hanks World War Two trilogy that started 23 years ago with an exhilarating land-war story in Band of Brothers, and continued with a battle-at-sea story in The Pacific (2010). Masters of the Air follows that template exactly, with a large but close-knit brotherhood of Army fliers based on real-life characters and history.
In 1943, the US Eighth Air Force was sent to the UK, and their air base in Norfolk is the scene of most of the drama on the ground. The series’ heroes are two endlessly brave pilots who happen to be best friends, with similar nicknames but polar-opposite personalities. Butler’s character of Buck is sober and realistic about the low odds of surviving the war.
Butler is photographed and costumed with all the movie-star glamour of Golden Age Hollywood, barely a smudge on his face or a hair out of place even under the worst circumstances. The actor’s charismatic presence lets him lean into that nostalgic role. It is conspicuous, though, that Austin’s accent often slips into a Southern drawl left over from Elvis, which he had recently filmed, even though Cleven says he is from Wyoming, a completely different part of the country.
Callum Turner plays Major John “Bucky” Egan, who gave Buck his nickname when they were in flight school together. He is the scrappy, gung-ho type, who itches to get into battle, drinks too much in his downtime, and flies off the handle easily. As with his character in another recent throwback film, George Clooney’s 1930s-era The Boys in the Boat, Turner expertly captures a salt-of-the-earth figure, full of old-timey gumption and tenacity.
Along with the rest of the squad, Buck and Bucky fly dozens of missions to destroy Germany’s munitions factories and stockpiles of weapons. As the squad heads into the most dangerous areas, the death toll is extremely high. In those scenes of spectacular action, as German fighters shoot at US planes, some crash and burst into flames. Others are so damaged when the wings catch fire that the crew has to parachute into different dangerous situations behind enemy lines. That immersive, in-air action is the most ambitious and effective aspect of the series.
It is directed with great consistency by a line-up that suits the series’ high pedigree. Cary Joji Fukunaga (No Time to Die) handled the first four instalments, followed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel), Dee Rees (Mudbound) and Tim Van Patten (Game of Thrones). At times they reveal the gruesome reality of war, with half of a flier’s face shot off. But there is an equal amount of less-effective attention to the manoeuvres inside the noisy B-17 bombers, with a lot of dialogue in the order of “Incoming! Seven o’clock!” and “Bombs away!”
The lesser-known actors can be as galvanising as the stars here. Nate Mann, a relative unknown, has charisma that matches Butler’s in a major role as Major Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, the pilot who flew the most missions, and whose reluctance to take any time off is heroic but not healthy.
Anthony Boyle narrates the series as Major Harry Crosby, a navigator constantly getting airsick, and at first seems to be merely comic relief. As the series goes on, Crosby becomes one of the most layered characters, carrying the weight of its themes about the emotional cost of war. Rafferty Law is charming as a young mechanic, and Branden Cook is a forceful presence as one of the Tuskegee Airmen – from the famed unit of black fliers created because the US Army was segregated – who is talented at mapping routes to escape the enemy.
But the show was shot in 2021, and some actors who are now well-known have small roles, including Barry Keoghan (Saltburn). And a heads-up to Doctor Who fans: although Ncuti Gatwa is featured in the opening credits, he doesn’t turn up until episode eight (of nine), when some of the Tuskegee Airmen arrive to help the Eighth. He has hardly any lines, but in his few words he does nail the American accent.
Reckoning with the moral and emotional cost of war is the show’s most contemporary twist, but that theme doesn’t accumulate any resonance until very late in the series. “All this killing we do, day in, day out,” Crosby says to Rosie, surfacing the kind of thought the men couldn’t risk dwelling on too much. “[It] does something to a guy. Not in a good way.” Rosie says about the enemy, “They got it coming”. That intriguing, reflective strand is one thing the series has not borrowed from old war movies. As bracing as it is in many ways, Masters of the Air could have used more of that freshness and less nostalgia.
★★★☆☆
Masters of the Air is on Apple TV+ from 26 January
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