Masters of the Air (Hanks/Spielberg series on Apple+)

Fuckit, we have threads for Pacific & Band of Brothers - this one deserves a thread too

Based on the book by Donald Miller
focused on the legendary Eighth Air Force 100th Bomb group “the Bloody Hundred” who were sent into some absolutely fucked shitfights and (some) lived to tell the tale

Austin Butler & Barry Keoghan star
Cary Joji Fukunaga directkng first 4 eps

first 3 episodes have gone up

https://external-preview.redd.it/masters-of-the-air-imagine-a-bunch-of-people-throwing-up-v0-x-0iFq9O2vGmqCwLoeFZP9wwdAqfC4BnNOLgbLtH-8I.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=f3b434c6825f3321e13d85413be79e6b56d81dd4

it takes a minute for the show to warm up, ie first episode was a bit so-so
a lot of exposition and forced Winters/Nix moments imposed on Buck & Bucky which were kinda corny - cgi air battles do look a bit weird at first but they do a really great job with the action editing to make it scary as fuck & some of the combat scenes look so fucking good you kinda settle into it

places i least want to be: locked in b52 formation being strafed by like, a thousand enemy fighters ugh terrifying

episode 3 is the Regensburg mission & it is fucking intense as hell, best ep so far imo

Bucky (Callum Turner) character is v annoying imo. idk if they intended him to be so deeply & pathologicslly unserious but i would fucking strangle him after 10 minutes based on the show
just an absolute tool

Fukunaga ? I’m on board

yeah it looks gorgeous as expected

one of the things i love is the way the combat sequences show just how dependent the crews are on each other, and how differently they react in intense situations

like, the panicked & understandable reaction of wanting bail out: but if you do that, what are you doing to the mission, what does that do to the remaining crews still under attack, is there a way to stay in the air and still be of service & not endanger the other crews, mission etc

it’s like Apollo space missions with the added terror of combat in a lot of ways. even the struggles with the crew often being an afterthought to the importance of the machinery itself mirrors what the early apollo crews went through w engineering— the bomber guys were never trained on how to bail out. if they bailed out irl it was probably their first time doing it. no one gave anythought to how to preserve/extend THEIR lives or safety. mission was primary. plane was primary. they wore sheepskins & weird electric suits bc those fortresses were literal tin cans, no insulation at all, as cold as 40 below!
suck it up boys.

After Band of Brothers and even The Pacific strange choice to go with basically zero character development in this.

i wouldnt say there’s zero
it just comes in slower bursts because you really only get a true sense of them when they’re in combat … they’re not trudging through fields together for days or bivouaking shoulder to shoulder for weeks and months at a time

correction: i said b52 upthread i meant b17 of course

mea culpa

ep4 - a good episode! but tbh i think i’m mentally busting it down a notch bc no combat lol

mechanic fixing the plane while they’re taxiing was badass

fuck episode 5 is brutal

talk about hell in the air

so much shit you don’t think about, like what the base must be like after they have lost so many crews, like living in some kind of a ghost town after the early camaraderie & crowdedness.

and the post-mission interrogation. so fucking grim & harrowing.

and again, air combat sequences are incredibly well put together, so fucking intense & scary & crazy

We were trying to work out why this was not doing it for us in the same way that Band of Brothers did, and partly we think it's because the guys in BoB were infantry, they were just guys, doing their best, mostly enlisted, and they lived in crappy conditions all the time. Whereas these guys are elite, confident (arrogant, even), and they are only in danger when they are in the air, really. So it's a very different programme, and it has taken this long to really get into it. Totally agree that the most recent episode was super grim. It was a little on the nose for one of the Americans to support the indiscriminate bombing of citizens (just one line, "this is a war," or something similar) and then to pass by a bombed house in London, but overall I'm coming to really like it. Now that I've adjusted my expectations.

Feel like I should just watch the last episode and miss the rest.

Generally think I'd rather rewatch BoB for the third time! I still haven't seen the Pacific.

please dont skip! — it’s worth watching the whole thing imo

I’ve held off so far after trying to decide if my dad would like to watch. My grandfather was a B-17 copilot in 25th Air Force the while the show covers a group in the 8th Air Force, so the missions and locales differ but I’d imagine a lot of the air combat is similar. My grandfather didn’t often talk about specifics, outside of his love of aviation before and after the war, but on the rare occasions when he did speak about the actual combat missions he was pretty shook.

My grandad was a sweetie, who would also say "my only regret is that I didn't kill more nazis". Otherwise he would talk about the places he was stationed (night watch on the pyramids!) but not the "work" itself.

Also, xpost, ok yes, will not skip!

xpost oh wow mh, that’s amazing.

dunno, maybe it would be good for your dad to see it idk?could help give him deeper appreciation of what yr grandad experienced. those pilots were so tough and smart and brave!

and shitting their pants for hours at a time

I always thought i would want to be the ball gunner but then i was goalie in hockey and soccer so *makes spiral crazy finger against my head and cuckoo bird noises*

lol

i think i’d be a waist-gunner? idk. at least ~slightly~ less claustrophobic in that spot w the open side door. those guns are beefy, i like how they sound lol

lets be real my irl position on a b-17 i would be curled up in a ball crying

Lol

My one comfort would be that there's no way anyone would let me near all that expensive equipment. I'd be in the mess hall, dishing up breakfasts.

It's one of the things that this show highlights really well without being all do-you-see about it: the cost of everything. Those planes, those flight suits, those bombs, those fancy jackets, the people in them, the jeeps, the food, the huge maps, the little models, it all costs so much money. War is such a colossal waste of resources.

yeah and the fact that the Allies are getting their asses handed to them in this particular air war & they’re just throwing planes & bodies at the problem purely to be able to show numbers to the higher command

it’s fucked

the fact that there was anyone in the group left to even talk about it is stunning

Still watching, the action is decent enough, but it’s not very good as a series. Still no character development, no narrative arc (what if Band of Brothers but just random battles rather than following them from training to victory), just guys you don’t really know shooting at planes, some of whom die but you barely know their names (if that).

yeah i don’t disagree - the narrative structure is somewhat lacking overall. the time-stamping is all over the place, episode to episode, where 1 ep is a single day then another spans months.

but i think the stories within each episode are really moving.

it’s a bit more like The Pacific than BoB in that regard i would say. there is a through line but it’s not as robust as peels off into various forks

Change of pace this week and a bit of a mixed bag but the Egan storyline is equal parts intense, terrifying and harrowing. Looking forward to the football match in episode 8 now though

Lol, I could barely watch the pre-credits sequence of the first episode without having a panic attack, there's no way I can do a whole series of this

I mean, I could handle the Bastogne episode of BoB but at least if you got blown to bits in Bastogne it wouldn't be followed by falling 50,000 feet in the air

Oh yeah, every time they bail out my hands start sweating.

That post does not look good out of context.

they said on the companion podcast that often when they bailed out it was their first time ~ever~ doing it - they had no training on how to bail out

Needed a couple more episodes like this mixed in at the beginning IMO. Characters you can follow instead of just goggled heads getting blown up!

even though i had obv seen hogans heroes and great escape etc, i had never given a lot of thought to the concept of downed pilots/airmen and what their experiences may have been like … enjoying the egan storyline

This show is way too fond of Cinematic Soaring Strings and pounding drums under every theoretically dramatic moment.

Damn you, Hans Zimmer and your influence.

Also lol @ Buck doing an impression of The Bear Jew’s “Teddy Fucking Ballgame” and the navigator taking a pep pill and getting the Limitless flash of light.

well sure but also: Tuskegees enter the chat :)

those Tuskegee p51’s over France were cool as hellllll

the amount of detail they put in the prison camp set is pretty insane imo

also i’ve said it before and i will say it again Bucky is a fucking nut, he would drive me insane. Like a 13 year old hopped up on red cordial. how Buck didn’t punch him in the face like that every ~day~ is beyond me

Saw the first episode last night, it was vv good! I think them getting thrown into the meat grinder right away before we get to even know some of the guys who wind up dying is sort of perhaps similar to the experience Buck is going through, showing up and having 3 bombers and their whole crews go before he knows them. I don't know if that was the intent but I always lean into the intent being there with such things. Looked good, brutal as hell too.

difficult to adjust back to normcore Buck after his Feyd Rautha in Dune 2 lol

Great finale - some harrowing shit in the front half, then I just cried happy/sad tears for the whole back half

If I was a dude back then i would absolutely have had a cool mustache like Rosie

FYI there’s a great companion documentary called “The Bloody Hundredth” up on Apple+ now too
- interviews with the real dudes (including Rosie!) & tons of footage, great watch - highly recommend.

The finale made me retroactively dislike the series.

why?

just finished this - very compelling show even though the pacing/characterisation were all over the place. Last few episodes felt a bit rushed, with some pointless sidetracks (e.g. Crosby's British girlfriend was great but we didn't really need to know she was a spy, and if we did, would've been nice if they could have given her a moment in the finale.)

Also wish they had spent at least another episode focused on the Tuskegee airmen. Their planes looked so cool but I kinda hated the way they were included in the story - felt like the show was trying to fulfil a diversity quota. like, imagine casting Ncuti Gatwa and not giving him any kind of distinguishing characteristic.

idk if it was historically accurate but bucky's raising the flag moment was kinda eye-rolly

Rosie is the best. Loved all the flying combat scenes, and the parts where they're looking up to see how many planes came back. Just drives home what a surreal, gut-wrenching experience that must have been - one minute, you're seeing all your friends take off, the next they're just gone and most of the time, you don't even know if they made it out alive

yeah Rosie’s story is really fascinating to me, interested on reading more about him

As much as I've grown used to this sort of thing in tv, I was still a bit taken aback by the rather sudden fate of one character in episode 3

Same here, but I'm wondering if the series was shot before his role in that film?

Were the bombers really designed so that the only way in was to do weird reverse pullup gymnastics? How many pilots died in bad dismounts?

I wonder if any of the background actors were also in zone of interest...

yep pretty much! the point was carrying the bombs - the people/airmen were pretty much secondary considerations in all of the engineering decisions

This entire series was stressful but well done. Every episode is so nerve wracking.

Saw that Timothy Van Patten directed the finale and I instantly relaxed seeing his opening credit, expecting it would be handled well (and it was).

I've never seen Band of Brothers but will watch the documentary on the Hundredth and Band of Brothers at some point.

One thing I preferred about this treatment as opposed to Rogue Heroes was that I liked that the music and soundtrack seemed contemporary to the times, as opposed to soundtracking high energy scenes with ACDC or some other modern music as in some historical dramas.

It would have been nice to have more on the Tuskegee Airmen and I was glad to see so many epilogues. Not sure how much of that choice is in the adaptation, how much that is in the source material. I was wondering what happened to Crosby's friend afterwards and would have liked an epilogue but at the same time it felt strange thinking about his wife and family. Maybe it's in the book. I'm sure I'll get the book for my father in law at some point, that's the kind of thing he loves.

the documentary helps to provides some of the grounding that’s missing, that you get in the Band of Brothers series episodes with the key interviews with the actual men themselves. It really helps so much to hear them speak about their experiences themselves

Watched episode 5 - that run to Munster was an aerial hellscape. The show quite smartly perhaps shifted perspective to stay with Rosenthal's plane as everyone crashed and burned around him, leaving their fates a complete mystery in a way which I thought was v compelling (even knowing that many of them will return, having others die from this POV was a pretty gripping choice. I kept wondering how anyone ever made it through that arena of the war unscathed.

it’s hard to imagine what that would be like, to survive something so deathly.

I remember my grandparents would randomly drop scenes of total horror into their conversations ("I remember I was riding on a double decker bus and the one behind me got bombed" or "I saw a ship of soldiers in the Mediterranean, get bombed and sink in front of eyes") and it was a puzzle thinking about how they got from that to being cuddly old grandparents

This was good, probably better than The Pacific. Sometimes it veered into glossy but for the most part it felt as real and harrowing as the two previous shows. The last couple episodes were paced weird, with events happening very quickly and the scale of time was lost. Maybe some of those elements, like the introduction of the Tuskegee or the stalag, should have happened earlier in the show so it didn't feel so cramped in. But overall, satisfying show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQJp-FoH0Es

ooh yay! thx!
mr veg just gave me the Donald Miller book for my birthday & i am excited to read it

also, slightly long back story but 15 years ago we went to Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in DC and i bought myself this cool P51 mustang coffee mug that shows the silhouettes & specs on it. So i guess mr veg started digging around to find the same mug with a B17 Fortress, but couldnt find it anywhere until he stumbled on one in the Air Force Museum in Ohio online gift shop — so now I finally have a pair! A Fortress AND Mustang mug together at last.

which is all to say yes I really am this nerdy about ww2 irl

i appreciate that episode 6 doesn't shy away from the ugly nature of the german grounds troops and some elements of the civilian populace a bit rather than merely saving that for the gestapo, bc clearly there was indeed a cult-like mental illness at work in germany at the time which is vv particular to rabid fascism and certainly has manifested itself in other ways in other countries at other times.

I moved from London East Anglia in 2019 and Thorpe Abbotts is about a 30-minute drive from here, I'm going to go visit the 100th museum at some point, although there are a myriad of airfields with great little volunteer-run places scattered all around, including one in a place nearby called Old Buckenham, where Jimmy Stewart and Walter Matthau were stationed.

Dang it, *to* East Anglia

oh that sounds cool!