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Masters of the Air delivers the best WWII action in a generation
26.01.2024 - 14:09 / polygon.com
Fans of World War II movies, and of the European air war in particular, may recall the 1990 film Memphis Belle, which told a highly fictionalized story of the first B-17 bomber crew to complete its 25-mission tour of duty over Europe. While that film got most of the technical aspects of air combat right, it was a swing and a miss when it came to its writing. Even with a young and lovable Sean Astin manning the ball turret, that didn’t stop producers from making crooner Harry Connick Jr. hum a few bars from the tail gun. Overall it was a mixed bag, relying on black-and-white stock footage and especially heavy-handed performances from David Strathairn and John Lithgow to get its point across.
Oddly enough, the first episode of Masters of the Air seems to make multiple callbacks to that very film, right down to the bit about singing. But it does so in a novel way that manages to fully exorcise that middling effort from viewers’ minds within the first 25 minutes. The result is a two-episode premiere that shows off some of the best WWII action in a generation.
Where Memphis Belle shows a bomber crew rapturously in love with its airplane, nearly swaddled in its embrace for the entire running time of the film, Masters of the Air makes it clear that most flyers were absolutely terrified of their aircraft. The Flying Fortress isn’t the super weapon that was sold to the American public or the hundreds of thousands of eager young recruits who volunteered early on in the war. It’s a delicate airframe built for speed with a paper-thin hull that offers little to no protection for the 10-man crews trapped inside, loaded up like cattle next to 500-pound bombs, explosive tanks of compressed oxygen, and enough aviation fuel to incinerate them all in seconds.
Like Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Masters of the Air pulls no punches when it comes to the human toll of war. Men are ripped apart on screen with horrifying regularity, their broken bodies tumbling to the floor inside cramped crew compartments, their entrails smeared across Perspex canopies amid smoke and flame. Fortresses burst like balloons and plummet from the sky, slowly and sickeningly rolling over into terminal dives, leaking oil and smoke behind them. But it is the speed of these engagements that is so terrifying, with back-and-forth exchanges of gunfire that last mere fractions of a second. I found myself flinching multiple times on the first watch through. The lavish CGI work and the painstaking cinematography choreographed both inside and around the cockpit-sized sets make it clear that the Americans are completely overmatched by their German adversaries. The mental toll that realization takes on the characters is obvious, and the actors’
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