:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/mentormedier/BGKIMGZ6BBGTFDJB7EKSPYYCCI.jpg "The war series “Masters of the Air” does not live up to expectations – Dagsavisen")
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4
TV-drama
«Master of the Air»
Apple TV+, nine-part series premiering on January 26
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– They got what they deserved, they really got what they deserved. We have done terrible things, but we had no choice, says Major and bomber pilot Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal to colleague Harry Crosby. He has had a moment of doubt about the acts of war they have been involved in.
Major Crosby has also quoted Nietzsche’s sentence that he who fights monsters must beware of becoming a monster himself. The scene is one of the few moments where “Master of the Air” stands out in the crowd of classic war stories from Hollywood, it’s just a shame that this very expensive series, which took ten years to complete, doesn’t offer more of them.
The fact that Major Rosenthal notes that the Allies had to use extreme violence to stop the Nazis is not due to his Jewish origins. This major became one of the most decorated pilots in the 100th Bomb Group, a brave man who volunteered for twice as many sorties as his service actually required. On one of them towards the end of the liberation, he was shot down in no man’s land, and became an eyewitness to the atrocities of the Nazis when he came across a concentration camp.
Major Rosenthal was thus a real person, like the other characters in “Master of the Air”, but the series is unable to fully convey that fact. The reason for that may be that it comes across as too overproduced, glossy and groomed Hollywood production to make an impression, this is reminiscent of fiction, with actors who are more reminiscent of the heroes in the war films about the Second World War as they have always been portrayed – without offer something more. And despite the fact that the characters in the series are actually depicted as composite types, this is not too one-sidedly heroic or war is presented as an action-packed adventure for the rough men.
It also does not help the feeling of reality that the actors involved appear as archetypes of Hollywood heroes. One of them is “Elvis” star Austin Butler, improbably handsome in a pilot’s jacket, pilot’s glasses and a mane of hair James Dean could envy. An actor with many expressions, however, he is not.
He copes with the grief of lost friends after tough tours and battles with German fighters, by posing alone on the runway, in front of a magical and fateful English sunset. To the tones of powerful trumpets in the background music that will emphasize the seriousness of the drama that Butler’s character – Major Gale “Buck” Cleven lived through, and survived. Fellow actor Callum Turner has the role of pilot and buddy John “Bucky” Evan, a slightly rougher type who copes with his fear of death with women and alcohol, and who is so numb from war that he asks to be punched in the face to feel something.
The scene has been told in war dramas on TV and film many times before, and the fact that the actor has the appearance of a Clark Gable type also does its part to remove the story from the real drama it is intended to retell.
The series is based on historian Donald L. Miller’s book about the American bombers’ war in the years 1943 to 1945. They flew huge B-17s over German territory and bombed military and strategic targets in broad daylight, and the planes were easy targets for German fighters and vulnerable for anti-aircraft fire. Their unit was nicknamed “The Bloody Hundreth” as a result of the heavy losses, and their raids are depicted in some of the rawest and fiercest aerial combat action scenes ever seen. Here it goes so fast that it is impossible to distinguish one tail gunner from the other, in an inferno of bullet rain from German fighters that pierced airframes and people in droves up there among the clouds.
The dimension missing from this drama is the massive destruction that the massive bombing is causing on the ground. Here the aircrews celebrate a perfect hit on the target far down there, before turning their noses home, for example when they bombed a submarine facility at Nyhavna in Trondheim in 1943. But did they do it? According to Wikipedia, the American bombs hit parts of the Germans’ submarine bunkers, but also surrounding residential areas, and eight Norwegian civilians were killed. This was of course not something the pilots at the time could see for themselves or know, but the fact that the bomb craters and ruins do not appear as anything other than scenery means that this becomes too pretty and decorative, and more of a “Biggles” story than a factual and reality-oriented series which will tell about atrocities in war.
The first episodes focus on the pilots’ journey, their growing fear of being shot down and the grief and shock of fallen comrades. They react in the pub, and navigator Harry “Bing” Crosby (Anthony Boyle) – the series’ occasional narrator, ends up in a romantic drama with English Alexandra (Bel Powley). She is one of the very few female characters here who is more than a decoration, but disappears as quickly as she appears. Here, the Tuskegee pilots, the colored American fighter pilots, also get a place in some sequences, but things like the reason why they have to keep going even in a segregated American military, the series deftly avoids elaborating on anything in particular.
It is up to a German officer to dig into that matter, when he asks why the colored pilots risk their lives, considering the kind of society that awaits them at home.
The last part of the series focuses more on the pilots who survive the air battles, and end up in German captivity towards the end of the war. It opens up other aspects of the war story, but the lives of the POWs do not contribute to more human drama. Series creator John Orloff and his team of screenwriters have gone for a familiar depiction of the pilots’ time in the prison camps as well, and that reinforces the impression that they have tried to create as rich a war series as possible. The result is too many characters, which must be presented easily and simply in order to have time for everything. The many stories are not enough to make this epic as the goal has been.
It’s finally here, I would have liked to say about “Master of the Air”, the series that concludes Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ war trilogy about the efforts of American soldiers in the fight against Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and all that death and suffering entailed . It was expected to be the big TV experience of the winter, 20 years after “Band of Brothers”, the masterful HBO series that was a continuation of Spielberg and Hanks’ collaboration on the war film “Saving Private Ryan” from 1998.
The series called “Krigens brorskap” on NRK helped to raise the threshold for TV drama as a narrative medium at the time, and it still stands out as a raw and powerful retelling of a group of real soldiers’ experiences during the Second World War. This rawness is due, among other things, to the series’ close depiction of the horrific and merciless nature of the war, where the focus is closely on the soldiers who fought their way through a Nazi-occupied Europe in the last phase of the war.
The 2010 sequel The Pacific followed the experiences of three soldiers during the Pacific War, based on their own accounts – and dwelt even more on human suffering and the cost of war. It remains a startlingly brutal anti-war depiction even for an HBO series. This is where “Master of the Air” becomes a pale sequel in comparison, which does not come close to portraying the horrors and consequences of war with the same temperature.
Another explanation for this series not catching on has to do with the passage of time. “Band of Brothers” from 2001 includes the soldiers from Easy Company who were still alive, in features where the old men tell about the events the series dramatizes. Now there are no time witnesses left.
And while “Masters of the Air” is too pompous for its own good, it is not a banal heroic tale of American bravery. But it comes with a glossy and heavily retouched visual packaging that creates distance from reality. Considering the starting point, this is tame and lifeless, and such a neat and formulaic depiction of war history that parts of it could have been documentary drama on National Geographic. Even with Cary Fukunaga on the directing side.
That may be because this is no longer an HBO production. Instead, it is the cash-rich Apple TV+ behind the series, which strictly speaking tells a very important story – the brutal fight against Nazism and fascism. The fact that this is a relevant topic to this day, and the fact that the series stands out as an ambitious and very expensive TV production, makes it worth watching nonetheless. But it is not as memorable as “Band of Brothers”.
[ Se en god serie på Netflix ]