The end of 'Masters of the Air' inspires a revisit of the last Hanks/Spielberg WWII epic, plus 'Girls5eva,' 'The Tourist,' 'Apples Never Fall,' and more
I also just rewatched the two original series. „Band“ is the most entertaining, and really a master class in how a 10 part series should work in terms of storytelling. Also Dick Winters was just an amazing human being and the archetype of what we imagine the „Greatest Generation“ to have been. But there is a sense in which „Band“, by focusing on the best the U.S. Army had to offer, really is kind of propaganda, even if it’s basically all true. It’s a selective truth. „Pacific“ offers a useful corrective. All the major characters, even John Basilone, are flawed. Leckie at times is not even particularly likable. These are real men and more representative of the average American soldier in WWII. The „Pacific“ is also brutal and grinding, the Americans never get to see „why we fight“, the way Easy Company sees Nazi evil directly in the form of a concentration camp. It’s just a slog of kill or be killed. War at its most horrific. I was actually surprised how much more I appreciated „Pacific“ on a second watch. „Masters of the Air“ is a deep disappointment in comparison with either of its predecessors. I agree with all of your criticisms, and I also find it just tendentious at times. The show also looks simply fake. Whether it’s the CGI or a smaller budget, it never seems real the way the other two shows did.
Masters has depressed me more than I can say, all the more because I spent ten years researching and writing a novel about a bombardier who flies first in the 92nd, then in the 351st over Schweinfurt, and is then a prisoner of Stalag Luft III (amidst other adventures). It is a world I know well, and while Masters gets a lot of things right, the cookie-cutter characters and ridiculously weak script is coupled with wooden performances.
One of the hardest things to convey about the early air was was the sheer amount of carnage engendered by the combination of a bad idea (precision daylight bombing was a bullshit theory conceived by non-combatants with no practical experience) with the stubborn intractability of Bullwinkle saying "this time for sure!" Even Clark Gable's propaganda film made during the war with the 351st to encourage enlistment showed a bomb run exploding harmlessly in a field near the target while he intones "Way to lay it on them, boys!"
People died at an alarming rate, and you never saw them again. The bunks emptied out, and every day was more of the same. Fifty below on oxygen for eight hours while beautifully made German machine shot at you coming and going. Sometimes it was a milk run and they never saw a fighter, and other times it was a meat grinder. Masters quickly jumped away from the greatest air campaign of the war, Big Week. It was as though it no longer mattered. Shitty storytelling.
Band of Brothers came out right after 9/11 and featured charismatic actors and a dynamite script with a simple story of good versus evil, heroism versus cowardice (often bending the truth to smear officers like Norman Dike, whose reputation never recovered from the portrayal). Ambrose's book is based on extensive interviews with many surviving members, so the resulting script gave the actors a lot to work with. Ron Livingston's Lewis Nixon was especially winning, IMO.
The Pacific, on the other hand, was drawn from what Paul Fussell called "the greatest combat memoir ever written," Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed, as well as Robert Leckie's 1957 Helmet for My Pillow. The latter book is very much of its era, with wisecracking tough Marines in the model of Mailer or Audie Murphy. Everybody has a nickname, everybody is brave, the Japanese are monsters, etc. It's a good read but not particularly revealing.
Basilone, on the other hand, suffers from his immense heroisom and status as the ultimate Marine. His romance was real enough, but in reality Jon Seda is much too small a man (and an actor) to play him, so his character is pretty flimsy. Basilone should have been characterized as a superhero, because that's what he was and what everybody who knew him said he was.
The Pacific's main failing (as far as popularity) is that it is the best film about war that's ever been made, and in being such is gruesome, horrific, and utterly without redemption. That war was the most brutal and least romantic of any modern conflict up to that point, with both sides viewing one another as subhuman. There was never any attempt to explore the Japanese side of the equation, nor of the larger issues that led to the war; that would have been outside the scope. As it was, the production damn near bankrupted HBO and Playtone because the realism was not cheap. It was also not popular. It is, however, largely accurate.
As Tim O'Brien so eloquently wrote:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you
feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been
made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no
virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
My boyfriend always repeats the line from the Pacific that Stella, the young Greek-Australian woman Leckie meets on shore leave, says after they have sex: "I liked that. Shame on me!"
Re Emmys the best performance I feel like I've watched this year has been Sho Kasamatsu as Sato in Tokyo Vice, but I know it's not going to be nominated since it's primarily in Japanese. He (and Ken Watanabe) have been so good on that show this season.
I really hope the Netflix affect gets us a final season of Warrior, though the last season wasn’t as great as the first two but I’d like to see it get a proper ending.
Since I don't have Max app access, I don't know if they're doing this but they should be featuring The Tuskegee Airmen (HBO production) as well as Memphis Belle (Warner Bros film) on their home page to try and draft off Masters of the Air on Apple+. But then I know how poorly Max was curated before Zaslav's reign of terror began so no doubt they're not doing this.
But I plan to track down and watch them now on my own, if I can find them.
Masters of the Air has its flaws for sure, it definitely suffers from some uneven storytelling. But the irony is that many of the same complaints were leveled at The Pacific when it debuted. I recall a lot of TV critics and viewers complaining about having three leads and jumping between narratives as well as the sheer darkness and brutality of it. But then I also recall that for all the praise, people were befuddled with trying to keep track of all the secondary characters in BoB too. But BoB is so easily rewatchable, viewers quickly learn all the secondary characters and can follow their mini-arcs easily on subsequent views.
The Pacific does get better and better with repeat views. That won't fix all the narrative issues that John Orloff is responsible for but I suspect it will improve the show's watchability with time. I don't understand why they gave Orloff showrunner duties on this series, he'd never done anything like this before and clearly was not prepared for such a daunting task. But I guess The Pacific was Bruce C. McKenna's first showrunner stint too.
Masters needed more practical effects to sell the authenticity of the bombers. That's the main detail early on that bugged me.
And yeah the narrative focus was a mess as well. I really wanted to learn more about Sandra Westgate (Bel Powley) – the only character I cared about – but we were instead bombarded with an ensemble cast with too many little plots that didn't service the main story. Even the time skips were clunky, lazy.
It's no Pacific or Band so I don't think I'll be watching it again. However, I did enjoy the show so there's that at least.
Now that I’ve seen all nine episodes of Masters of the Air, I agree with you. There were good parts, but it never decided what it wanted to be—an air combat show, a POW show, an escape-the-Nazis show. What was weirder was making Crosby the POV character when he wasn’t involved in the latter two storylines and largely left the first one a few episodes in. And the rate at which the show abruptly abandoned things that they had been building (escaping with the resistance in Belgium; Buck and Alex planning an escape from Stalag Luft III; the ominous “we’re using you as bait” reveal when Rosie re-upped) was jarring. The difference between BoB and the other two of the trilogy is that BoB was a show about a group of people who were in WWII, and MotA/Pacific were shows about WWII that had people in them.
Also, as gripping as the aerial combat scenes were, the real footage from the Netflix WWII documentary series was even more so.
We also re-watched Pacific last month when we started Masters and were frustrated we couldn't binge it. My daughter was less than 1 yr old last time we watched now she's 15. Really enjoyed Sledge and Snafu and it yes was very dark. Missed the following of one tribe from Brothers but it was really well done. While I like the storyline of the air war better than the Pacific theater or ground war in Europe in WWII, Pacific is my #2 and Masters is a distant 3rd, but we are enjoying them all. We visited Normandy a few years back and it brings it all home.
Just here to say I RARELY can't get through a novel, and Apples Never Fall was one of them. I was shocked it got turned into a series, but also it is Liane Moriarty and she has had some great novels/adaptations. Hesitant to see this show due to how much the book sucked for me personally lol
I also just rewatched the two original series. „Band“ is the most entertaining, and really a master class in how a 10 part series should work in terms of storytelling. Also Dick Winters was just an amazing human being and the archetype of what we imagine the „Greatest Generation“ to have been. But there is a sense in which „Band“, by focusing on the best the U.S. Army had to offer, really is kind of propaganda, even if it’s basically all true. It’s a selective truth. „Pacific“ offers a useful corrective. All the major characters, even John Basilone, are flawed. Leckie at times is not even particularly likable. These are real men and more representative of the average American soldier in WWII. The „Pacific“ is also brutal and grinding, the Americans never get to see „why we fight“, the way Easy Company sees Nazi evil directly in the form of a concentration camp. It’s just a slog of kill or be killed. War at its most horrific. I was actually surprised how much more I appreciated „Pacific“ on a second watch. „Masters of the Air“ is a deep disappointment in comparison with either of its predecessors. I agree with all of your criticisms, and I also find it just tendentious at times. The show also looks simply fake. Whether it’s the CGI or a smaller budget, it never seems real the way the other two shows did.
Masters has depressed me more than I can say, all the more because I spent ten years researching and writing a novel about a bombardier who flies first in the 92nd, then in the 351st over Schweinfurt, and is then a prisoner of Stalag Luft III (amidst other adventures). It is a world I know well, and while Masters gets a lot of things right, the cookie-cutter characters and ridiculously weak script is coupled with wooden performances.
One of the hardest things to convey about the early air was was the sheer amount of carnage engendered by the combination of a bad idea (precision daylight bombing was a bullshit theory conceived by non-combatants with no practical experience) with the stubborn intractability of Bullwinkle saying "this time for sure!" Even Clark Gable's propaganda film made during the war with the 351st to encourage enlistment showed a bomb run exploding harmlessly in a field near the target while he intones "Way to lay it on them, boys!"
People died at an alarming rate, and you never saw them again. The bunks emptied out, and every day was more of the same. Fifty below on oxygen for eight hours while beautifully made German machine shot at you coming and going. Sometimes it was a milk run and they never saw a fighter, and other times it was a meat grinder. Masters quickly jumped away from the greatest air campaign of the war, Big Week. It was as though it no longer mattered. Shitty storytelling.
Band of Brothers came out right after 9/11 and featured charismatic actors and a dynamite script with a simple story of good versus evil, heroism versus cowardice (often bending the truth to smear officers like Norman Dike, whose reputation never recovered from the portrayal). Ambrose's book is based on extensive interviews with many surviving members, so the resulting script gave the actors a lot to work with. Ron Livingston's Lewis Nixon was especially winning, IMO.
The Pacific, on the other hand, was drawn from what Paul Fussell called "the greatest combat memoir ever written," Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed, as well as Robert Leckie's 1957 Helmet for My Pillow. The latter book is very much of its era, with wisecracking tough Marines in the model of Mailer or Audie Murphy. Everybody has a nickname, everybody is brave, the Japanese are monsters, etc. It's a good read but not particularly revealing.
Basilone, on the other hand, suffers from his immense heroisom and status as the ultimate Marine. His romance was real enough, but in reality Jon Seda is much too small a man (and an actor) to play him, so his character is pretty flimsy. Basilone should have been characterized as a superhero, because that's what he was and what everybody who knew him said he was.
The Pacific's main failing (as far as popularity) is that it is the best film about war that's ever been made, and in being such is gruesome, horrific, and utterly without redemption. That war was the most brutal and least romantic of any modern conflict up to that point, with both sides viewing one another as subhuman. There was never any attempt to explore the Japanese side of the equation, nor of the larger issues that led to the war; that would have been outside the scope. As it was, the production damn near bankrupted HBO and Playtone because the realism was not cheap. It was also not popular. It is, however, largely accurate.
As Tim O'Brien so eloquently wrote:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you
feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been
made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no
virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
My boyfriend always repeats the line from the Pacific that Stella, the young Greek-Australian woman Leckie meets on shore leave, says after they have sex: "I liked that. Shame on me!"
Re Emmys the best performance I feel like I've watched this year has been Sho Kasamatsu as Sato in Tokyo Vice, but I know it's not going to be nominated since it's primarily in Japanese. He (and Ken Watanabe) have been so good on that show this season.
I really hope the Netflix affect gets us a final season of Warrior, though the last season wasn’t as great as the first two but I’d like to see it get a proper ending.
Since I don't have Max app access, I don't know if they're doing this but they should be featuring The Tuskegee Airmen (HBO production) as well as Memphis Belle (Warner Bros film) on their home page to try and draft off Masters of the Air on Apple+. But then I know how poorly Max was curated before Zaslav's reign of terror began so no doubt they're not doing this.
But I plan to track down and watch them now on my own, if I can find them.
Masters of the Air has its flaws for sure, it definitely suffers from some uneven storytelling. But the irony is that many of the same complaints were leveled at The Pacific when it debuted. I recall a lot of TV critics and viewers complaining about having three leads and jumping between narratives as well as the sheer darkness and brutality of it. But then I also recall that for all the praise, people were befuddled with trying to keep track of all the secondary characters in BoB too. But BoB is so easily rewatchable, viewers quickly learn all the secondary characters and can follow their mini-arcs easily on subsequent views.
The Pacific does get better and better with repeat views. That won't fix all the narrative issues that John Orloff is responsible for but I suspect it will improve the show's watchability with time. I don't understand why they gave Orloff showrunner duties on this series, he'd never done anything like this before and clearly was not prepared for such a daunting task. But I guess The Pacific was Bruce C. McKenna's first showrunner stint too.
I had forgotten SyFy still even existed until you mentioned it. I don’t think I’ve watched a show of theirs since the BSG / Doctor Who era.
I may have missed an explanation somewhere, but no Shogun reviews?
Masters needed more practical effects to sell the authenticity of the bombers. That's the main detail early on that bugged me.
And yeah the narrative focus was a mess as well. I really wanted to learn more about Sandra Westgate (Bel Powley) – the only character I cared about – but we were instead bombarded with an ensemble cast with too many little plots that didn't service the main story. Even the time skips were clunky, lazy.
It's no Pacific or Band so I don't think I'll be watching it again. However, I did enjoy the show so there's that at least.
Now that I’ve seen all nine episodes of Masters of the Air, I agree with you. There were good parts, but it never decided what it wanted to be—an air combat show, a POW show, an escape-the-Nazis show. What was weirder was making Crosby the POV character when he wasn’t involved in the latter two storylines and largely left the first one a few episodes in. And the rate at which the show abruptly abandoned things that they had been building (escaping with the resistance in Belgium; Buck and Alex planning an escape from Stalag Luft III; the ominous “we’re using you as bait” reveal when Rosie re-upped) was jarring. The difference between BoB and the other two of the trilogy is that BoB was a show about a group of people who were in WWII, and MotA/Pacific were shows about WWII that had people in them.
Also, as gripping as the aerial combat scenes were, the real footage from the Netflix WWII documentary series was even more so.
We also re-watched Pacific last month when we started Masters and were frustrated we couldn't binge it. My daughter was less than 1 yr old last time we watched now she's 15. Really enjoyed Sledge and Snafu and it yes was very dark. Missed the following of one tribe from Brothers but it was really well done. While I like the storyline of the air war better than the Pacific theater or ground war in Europe in WWII, Pacific is my #2 and Masters is a distant 3rd, but we are enjoying them all. We visited Normandy a few years back and it brings it all home.
Just here to say I RARELY can't get through a novel, and Apples Never Fall was one of them. I was shocked it got turned into a series, but also it is Liane Moriarty and she has had some great novels/adaptations. Hesitant to see this show due to how much the book sucked for me personally lol