Masters of the Air

Masters of the Air quickly becomes mired in its own cliched sentimentalism.

Back slapping jokery characterisations are the norm. Airmen who are at the same time overconfident but somehow, inexplicably wise. Its unconvincing, as is the general sense of longing, for a rose coloured vision of a war time past, that never existed.

Growing up I knew a man who fought in WWII and for a time had the unfortunate job of cleaning the bombers after a mission. What he told me about what was left in a plane after a bad mission was simply horrific. In fact, a lot worse than what we see depicted here. Although, in fairness, this series does at least make an effort to demonstrate, to a degree, the awfulness of war.

That said, this series feels in most respects, more like a pitch for glory rather than the grisly, depressing reality of conflict and I, for one, find it rather inappropriate. Especially given the spread of very serious conflicts, in the world today.

On the upside the acting is of a high standard, if somewhat hamstrung by the at times cheesy, cliched characterisations and associated narrative.

The real stand out in this series goes to its special effects, which can only be described as "amazing". A heck of a lot of money has been spent here and it really shows.

In summary, if the treatment had been more down to earth, realistic and steered away from glorifying war, this series could have been been a more meaningful and compelling watch. As it stands, to this reviewer, it comes across as yet another pro military poster child. Something the current war torn world, could well do without.

Was really hoping for a factually accurate representation of Air Combat in WW2, but what I was presented with (and in fairness I'm only 2 episodes in, so it might improve) is a massive bunch of revisionist, pro-American, anti-English/British nonsense that spends more time portraying squadrons, for want of a better word, "fannying around" than actually flying.

The performance of most of the actors is terrible, especially the two main characters. Austin Butler seems to have forgotten he's not playing Elvis anymore and has the same mannerisms and woeful underacting. This is only beaten by Callum Turner's hideous overacting. The only one that puts in a semi-noteworthy performance is Barry Keoghan.

The plot then spends precisely zero time building the main characters up during training like Band of Brothers, or even their pre-military lives. As a result, I just have no emotional investment in any of them. I don't care about them.

Also, the writers have fallen into the trap of creating the main characters like they seem to with a lot of modern characters. That is, they've been written to be overly cool, confident, super accomplished, "Mary Sue's" that can do no wrong and win at everything they do. The writers have created people that they _think_ the audience wants to see, but that just then makes them totally unrelatable. An example of this is where a fight starts in a pub with the British. The British pilot starts it, of course. The American pilots who, until this point, are portrayed as being overly confident, brash, and trying too hard to be cool, immediately switch personalites with the British who, until this point portrayed as, reserved, timid, and just in awe of the Americans in general. All of a sudden, the Americans become the ones that want to just mind their own business, are reserved and cool; while the portrayal of the RAF pilots are obnoxious, pompous, arrogant, and abrasive. Naturally, the American pilot utterly humiliates the British pilot by dancing all round him, making him fall over. The result is that the main characters are just thoroughly unlikeable and boring that you have absolutely no emotional investment in them. The absolute opposite of Dick Winters et al from the peerless Band of Brothers.

It also leaves a bitter taste in the mouth as the British are portrayed as bigger villains that actual enemy is.

Furthermore, the justification given for American bombing happening during the day was because they wanted to be more accurate at the expense of more risk - a challenge all the pilots faced with swagger, arrogance, and bravado, and because they are so much braver and heroic than the RAF wimps who just carpet bomb cities without a care in the world.

But back to reality, this was predominantly down to overconfidence and hubris of the US leadership and because they refused to learn lessons identified by the RAF and Luftwaffe and that bombing during the day was counterproductive. Sure, you may be able to hit the target more on the first run, but by the end of it, you had so few bombers and crew left you couldn't reliably hit anything. The more bombers you lost, the more you were likely to lose, which then meant the less likely you were to complete a run at all, never mind bomb the target.

This was proved correct when, on 22nd October 1943, the 8th Army stopped bombing it's unescorted daylight raids because they finally realised it was unsustainable. During this time, the USAAF, working with RAF Bomber Command, tried switching to night bombing, but found that the B-17s simply weren't capable and the crews not skilled enough to bomb with any amount of relevant precision. The ONLY reason day bombing could continue was due to the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine being placed in the P51, along with the advent of drop tanks, meaning the P51 could escort bombers all the way to the target and back again.

Not only this, but the much vaunted (and boasted about in the show), Norden Bombsight, was nowhere near as accurate as it is believed. Under test conditions, it was great. Under combat conditions where aircraft had to zig zag to evade being hit by flak and flying over poor European weather conditions, meant that it was barely more accurate than the RAF's night bombing anyway! What this resulted in was many completely avoidable American deaths, but I bet they won't say that during this series.

The best I can say is that the visuals are OK, but even they have been CGId to the extreme.

The missions themselves are boring and generally last 10 minutes, 15 minutes at the absolute most. Likely due to the fact that CGI has been used so heavily and the show couldn't afford more.

Sadly, what we've got here is a total misrepresentation of actual history, portrayed by a bunch of unlikeable characters simultaneously embodying the worst stereotypes of American soldiers and "modern" character development by writers that seem to have completely lost the ability to create a likeable character. They do all this in an overly CGId world, where most of the time the characters aren't doing anything remotely interesting or important and the 'combat' scenes last a grand total of 15 minutes. It's dull as dishwater and I'm sad that it's even been broadcast.