Masters of the Air

Masters of the Air completes a triumphant WWII trilogy that like Ken Burns' eloquent documentaries, will stand the test of time. [29 Jan - 18 Feb 2024, p.6]

Magnificent achievement.

These were real people – ordinary men doing extraordinary things. As a testament to heroism, Masters of the Air is first-rate.

If you are a fan of the genre, or simply not opposed to it, then Masters of the Air should undoubtedly be on your watchlist, and high up it too - for its championing of young talent, its emotional core, its narrative strength, its historical intrigue and its breathtaking action. Consider those lofty expectations well and truly met.

Some minor quibbles aside, this is another blockbuster TV smash: a dazzlingly vital history lesson that summons the best tension, drama and emotion of Band Of Brothers.

Masters of the Air isn’t trying to be modern. It seems, at times, to actively resist it. But this leads to a timelessness that suits its mission very well.

Many will praise the series for offering up an ambitious spectacle, but we honestly believe that its success lies in its refusal to shy away from the humanity of war. Which is all to say: Watch this show.

With incandescent storytelling, action-packed sequences, and exceptional performances, Masters of the Air is Apple TV+ at its very best and proves to be the first must-watch series of the year.

While “Masters of the Air” will get compared to HBO’s “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” it stands on its own, even if it doesn’t as often reach the same dramatic heights. Regardless, it’s a polished and well-crafted epic that earns its wings as well as your respect, and undoubtedly will leave you with a big lump in your throat.

While it takes some time to get there, Masters of the Air deftly tells a compelling tale. It honestly and sometimes painfully displays the trauma soldiers at war endure through heartfelt and genuine stories of camaraderie, determination, and sacrifice. This is pretty much all any veteran could ask for.

Watching this beautifully produced, highly detailed show is like visiting a history museum with an older relative who’s trying to get you interested in a time period they love.

Masters of the Air doesn’t stir the same sentiment that Brothers did so effectively. We are more in awe of the terrifying whole of the thing than invested in individual lives. That awe is enough to keep the series grimly compelling.

The series is massive, beautifully rendered and a reminder that war is murderous, gruesome and horrifically human.

"Masters of the Air" is largely a character drama and there are a lot of characters—too many, as it happens, for the earliest losses to register quite as profoundly with a viewer as the later ones do. But the strategy adopted by Mr. Orloff, and rooted in Mr. Miller's account, is to make death in war freshly alarming by making it disinterested and indiscriminate. And, frequently, gruesome. .... And the lessons are made all the more poignant.

It is meant on the one hand to achieve a high level of realism and on the other to echo the romanticism of the pre-revisionist World War II films that producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman would have grown up watching rerun on television. One would say it succeeds on both those accounts, even as they tend to fight one another.

There are times when a less controlled, more naturalistic approach might have made the drama more human. But when the first plumes of smoke from anti-aircraft guns break through the cloud cover, it is hard to resist Masters of the Air.

Masters of the Air is sincere, highly-watchable, and shines a welcome spotlight on a horrifically costly and irregularly explored aspect of the Second World War.

A worthy follow-up to those two esteemed miniseries, capturing the horror, brotherhood and patriotic duty that defined the American air campaigns against Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Missed opportunities and mid-stream course corrections suggest a better, more coherent version of “Masters of the Air” could have been constructed. But fans of WWII, brothers-in-arms action-adventure tales will likely be satisfied regardless thanks to the aerial derring-do amidst time spent with the four lead characters.

Reservations aside, the series worked like gangbusters on me for a different reason: It’s focused on capturing what it looks like — what it means, really — to work toward a common goal. To feel a deep sense of responsibility for one another. As that plays out over nine episodes, you can’t help but reflect on the absence of these kinds of stories coming out of Hollywood.

The series begins tentatively, builds up to a middle-episodes sag, and finishes well.

Masters of the Air is very watchable, a gorgeously cinematic experience even when the narrative grows especially distressing. Still, it's worth interrogating the use of a glossy, Spielbergian ending on a series like this.

It is an old-school tribute to the Greatest Generation and to those who fought against fascism — wait for the hoisting of the American flag in the finale — and as such it can be moving. But the story, which takes place between 1943 and 1945, is not as carefully paced and effectively written as the previous two miniseries. “Masters of the Air” is a good, but not great, conclusion to the trilogy.

There is much to admire about “Masters of the Air.” .... But it also stretches out a little too much. Some critical elements feel a bit tacked on. Some of the air battles suffer at the hands of sometimes-janky CGI. The point of view wanders. For all that, it’s really good, but not quite great. It is, however, important.

Masters of the Air isn’t always consistent and I don’t have a problem saying it’s only the third best of the Playtone-produced World War II dramas. But more often than not, it’s very good and when it’s very good, yes, it soars.

Overall, the result feels mixed: syrupy, jingoistic, with MIA characterisation and a sense of sexed-up war, rather than human cost.

Apple TV+’s WWII epic Masters of the Air is gorgeously filmed but dull, with a distinct lack of narrative urgency.

This show is a descendant of programs that weren’t just “well-made,” they were revolutionary, feeling like nothing else on TV. You can’t say that about “Masters of the Air,” a show that’s fine, but these war heroes and the TV lineage into which the dramatization of their heroism falls deserve better than “fine.”

“Masters of the Air” doesn’t rise to the level one might have hoped or expected – offering a potent reminder of the sacrifices the Greatest Generation endured, to be sure, without really finding its target.

If you're a die-hard World War II enthusiast, "Masters of the Air" will probably hit the sweet spot in capturing what makes this specific genre so appealing. But viewers with less of an emotional attachment to the period may find it harder to connect with — there's little here that we haven't seen done before, and frequently better.

There are too many characters introduced too fast, locations whizz by and air battles are too hazy and frenetic to focus your eyes on any one soldier. They go for bombastic but end up boring. They're a slog to get through. But if you can fly through the first three episodes, you will eventually find the kind of gripping, emotional and lofty television that is reminiscent of "Brothers" and "Pacific."

Befitting its title, Masters of the Air is sublime when it’s in flight, staging several incredible combat sequences in an arena that’s holy in its beauty and ungodly in its capacity for death. .... Unfortunately, when it turns that gaze to ground level, the series’ view of men at war becomes far less interesting and more treacly than that of its predecessors.

There are some Spielbergian flourishes peppered throughout Masters of the Air, from the masterful construction of its period setting to a soaring score that makes a valiant effort to inject the series with some raw emotional power. But those efforts prove overcompensating, as the thing that should make it all tick—the human heart—is tragically missing.

“Masters of the Air” is often absorbing and irresistable, even if it is not as compelling as the first two series. Part of the problem, especially in the first few episodes, is that there are so many characters, and battle after battle, that gets a bit confusing and repetitive.

Masters of the Air is a thrilling, entertaining watch that lacks the depth of its HBO-produced predecessors.

Masters of the Air ultimately lacks the adventurous spirit of the former and the emotional gravity of the latter. Unlike the precision bombardiers of the 100th, it only occasionally hits its target.

All of this should be exciting, vibrant, thrilling! But it's not. The show merely crashes when it should soar, and it becomes tiresome to sit through. It's hard to become invested with these men when they remain so stagnant, so uninteresting. There are a few flourishes here and there, like an indoor bicycle race shot exquisitely, but these are few and far between.

It’s merely an average war drama, with a few sequences that will thrill, offering a little bit more insight than you had before with some sturdy period detail and costuming. It’s just that when sights are set high, a humdrum construction can be a fatal blow.

“Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific,” and “Masters of the Air” intend to do with their deeply respectful odes to American heroism. But the third part of the trilogy is over-invested in recreating what we’ve seen before and under-invested in what made those previous series so impactful. It’s not the carnage or the spectacle. It’s the men.

“Masters of the Air” is a little too decorous to get into all that. Its heroes aren’t rebels or victims. They’re archetypes. The technology is the real star here; the B-17s are as period-perfect as they are immense. As for the story — well, at 25,000 feet, maybe it doesn’t matter that it’s almost as thin as the air.