Screens/Streaming

Masters of the Air
Where: Apple TV+
What: Miniseries, 9 episodes, 58 mins.
When: New episodes every Friday
Genre: Drama
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Incredibly realistic, gut-churning air battle scenes in a red-white-and-blue series of historical hagiography.

MASTERS OF THE AIR is high-class war porn that reaches almost comical levels of historic hagiography — it’s also pretty entertaining.

Based on veteran Donald. L. Miller’s memoir Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, the movie aims for Band of Brothers gravitas as it adds to the myth-building of the Second World War’s so-called Greatest Generation. The series was created by the producers of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, similar flag-waving fare.

Hard to imagine the North Korean film industry putting out a bigger love letter to its military than this celebration of the good ole U.S.A.’s air force, which occasionally manages to depict the horrors of war while largely selling the “nobility” of bombing a country run by “bad guys.”

Sadly, it’s a timeless tale that resonates today, with thoughts of newsreel shots of Gaza making one flinch every time the handsome movie U.S. flyboys yell “bombs away.”

All this while string sections swirl, clouds and Nazi flak drift by the rattling, airborne fortresses, loyalty is pledged between airmen and the results of the bomb drops are rarely depicted.

It’s the story of America’s 100th Bomb Group, who flew B-17 Flying Fortresses bombers on raids over Europe, wreaking devastation below and hideous casualty numbers among the fliers above.

In this telling, a steady stream of apparent male models is fed into the meat grinder of the European air war, perhaps lured to enlist by the spectacular and apparently, indestructible sheepskin and leather jackets they get to wear. There are many shots of chiselled, mustachioed, young men in leather looking off into the powder blue, cloud-speckled heavens as string sections swirl, the images evoking high-end cologne ads in glossy magazines.

Two flyboy buddies, pilots Buck (Elvis’s Austin Butler) and Bucky (Callum Turner) are the swashbuckling core of the story with narrator and navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) the narrative glue and the hint of a moral compass. Crosby is one of the few fliers shown to be contemplating the results of the piles of bombs they are dropping on Germany. And even he barely dwells on it.

Masters of the Air is less about the morality of the impact of the bombing and a lot about the “Holy fuck” of these cool-looking machines and how badass these amazing dudes look flying them.

Male teamwork is celebrated endlessly with pre-battle shots of the massing of dozens of B-17s in the sky, literally making the men look like beaming boys in heaven — before many were about to be dispatched to their version of such.

The air battle scenes are vertigo-inducing, horrific and realistic, leaving one to draw their own conclusions about the absurdity of this kind of battle and the nightmare of forcing the fliers and their victims through it.

Despite all the blood and gore, fliers seem to be able to bail out of burning planes with the same ease as doing cannon balls in a hotel pool. For all the moments of gut-wrenching, armrest-gripping horrors-of-war intensity, they are eclipsed by the steady stream of literal flag waving, misty-eyed musing, unbreakable-bond-declaring, operatic chorus builds and planes that soar as wide-eyed children wave encouragement from the ground.

Masters of the Air is a sizzling, sanitized look at the horrors of war whose entertainment value is directly related to one’s tolerance for U.S. flag waving.