If you’re wondering what sort of wartime mood Masters of the Air captures, the show’s title sequence is a brilliant distillation. With a moody filter and smoke perpetually billowing in the background, we dissolve through snapshots of the new Apple TV+ drama.
Silhouettes manoeuvre plane machinery, Barry Keoghan’s lieutenant gives a jaunty salute as he steers down a runway, Major Callum Turner’s skin gleams in the sun bouncing off his aviators, war planes glide and dive through cotton candy clouds, bullets and bombs pop off, Austin Butler’s chiselled face is tastefully cut and bloodied.
All of it is set to a rousing orchestral score. It’s wartime as a fragrance commercial. And a long one at that, but that may be to accommodate some of the names and faces that make up over 300 speaking parts in the show.
Even without knowledge of the executive producing heft of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks behind it, Masters of the Air is geared towards being a landmark of this year’s television. The cast is stacked not only in number but in star power: much of the next generation of Hollywood talent is here – well, the male half at least.
Austin Butler leads, fresh off his speech-modifying turn as Elvis Presley (he still has the syrupy drawl here), Barry Keoghan has traded in his most recently acquired accent, the Merseyside of Saltburn, for a Brooklyn one and Callum Turner has ditched the Boys in the Boat bottle-blonde hair. And as if those weren’t enough names to fill these planes, Doctor Who‘s Ncuti Gatwa has put down his sonic screwdriver to don a sheepskin aviator hat.
A spiritual sequel to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, the nine-part war saga follows the Bloody Hundredth, a regiment of pilots tasked with increasingly perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany. Steeling themselves for combat at 25,000 feet, there’s a poignant, gallows-humour camaraderie among the pilots on the UK air base, each of whom is assigned a Top Gun-style nickname.
Like the Spielberg/Hanks shows before it, Masters of the Air strives to capture the varied experiences of its recruits – including everyone from the stoic pilots to the ground crew and the occasionally hapless navigators.
Masters of the Air centres the brilliant filmmaking you would expect from the Spielberg connection, after Saving Private Ryan first set a new standard for war drama. The casting and production value here largely live up to the names attached, with battle sequences that flit between wide angles of planes in flawless formation and close-ups of the pilots in the cockpits, who take a page out of Tom Hardy’s spitfire pilot in Dunkirk, with face masks confining their performances to the top third of their heads.
Not all the production decisions are quite so sound. There’s plodding voiceover from one lieutenant (Anthony Boyle), a character we’re only wangled into caring about several episodes in, by which point some viewers might have given up. There are just so, so many characters it’s a wonder we started to care for him at all.
While Masters of the Air treads familiar dramatic territory, the sequences in which we see the sheer nuts and bolts of flying these things – all the while shooting at other jets, warding off frigid temperatures and trying to navigate where exactly in the northern hemisphere they might be – are stark. It leaves you wondering why anyone wanted to be a WWII pilot and how any of them even made it back alive.
The men of the 100th Bomb Group gather like schoolboys for an assembly each episode, to be told what fresh horror they are being sent into enemy skies for. The pilots are sent up time and time again in the cold glare of daylight to hit their bombing targets, in what we’re told by the British airmen is practically “suicide”. They’re sitting ducks for enemy fire.
Meanwhile, the Brits conduct their raids at night to mitigate the risk, in what the Bloody Hundredth lead us to believe is akin to a cowardice they will not stoop to. This rank American exceptionalism won’t come as any surprise to those who watched Band of Brothers.
But their daytime raids are indeed no mean feat. As prestigious and mighty as the planes look in that title sequence, they’re jokily referred to as a fleet of “tin cans” which wouldn’t be the better off for a head-on collision with some livestock.
In the wake of war dramas like Hacksaw Ridge, 1917 and All Quiet on the Western Front, which show the abject, brutal futility of these wars for what they were, the gung-ho depiction here is a curious one. When the men – some of whom have been cast as very, very young-looking actors – hear news of the numerous soldiers set to be sent up on “suicide” missions, they cheer, hoot and holler.
The mood on the fighter planes is largely one of slapstick fun, with soldiers protecting their knackers as shells peel through the sides of the plane. When certain jets catch fire and plummet to the far-off ground, the whole thing has a detached feel, as if it’s a video game we can reload to play this level again.
Men come and go, either injured or killed in the fierce fighting, but they’re quickly replaced by others who will likely suffer the same fate. All of it gets little more than a cocked eyebrow from the surviving soldiers, who wordlessly carry on.
Much of the initial apathy revolves around Butler’s Major Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven, who at one point smirks and bellows in the voice of the King of Rock and Roll: “Lets rack ’em up and knock ’em down!” Butler has an old-soul gravitas, in part conjured by the reverence those around have for him, but what does he make of the carnage? Dubious? Reluctant? Resigned? Your guess is as good as ours.
He is truly inscrutable. A handsome tabula rasa we could project anything onto. When he’s told an upcoming raid could “do some real damage”, there is not a single emotion on his features in response. He’s just serving a smouldering face – it’s like we’re still stuck in that perfume ad.
For those looking for a pure distillation of the wartime spirit of fable, Masters of the Air is largely it, until the men actually start to reckon with the psychological toll all this is taking – far past the point at which you would have thought the regiment’s body count would have brought it on.
Like Band of Brothers before it, the Apple TV+ drama may very well ignite a conversation about Hollywood’s happy adoption of a revisionist wartime attitude.
Still, it can’t be said enough: the cast and production value here are second to none, albeit with not enough Barry Keoghan for the Saltburn stans and scarce Ncuti Gatwa too. You just end up wishing they could have all been in something else.
Masters of the Air is available to stream on Apple TV+ from January 26.
Deputy TV Editor
Previously a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape for Digital Spy, when she’s not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas.
When she’s not bingeing a box set, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we’re all watching.
