For its first three episodes, “Masters of the Air” mostly puts us inside the World War II B-17 planes flying over Germany and the territories fighting Nazi rule, releasing bombs while fending off Nazi fire. It’s riveting and nauseating at the same time, being right there in the cockpits with these terrified kids on their combat missions — in one case, a mission where they’re merely serving as bait, to lure Nazi planes for other Allied squads to shoot down. Blind panic, claustrophobia, confusion, the grasping of lucky objects, disorientation, and, as in all wars, the big existential why of it all — they’re very much in play in this graphic, CGI-enhanced theater of war.
In one excruciating sequence of the miniseries, a companion to “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” a damaged B-17 is going down fast, and the crew decides to parachute out. One man, though, is stuck in the ball turret, that bubble on the belly of the plane that poet Randall Jarrell memorably, and with some irony, compared to a womb. Watching him try and fail and try some more to escape, wriggling and writhing like a poisoned rodent, the plane shuddering as it drops, it all leaves you with an unshakeable sense of horror. These men — the 100th Bomb Group, nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth” for its extensive losses — are like June bugs in a hurricane.
Those visceral first episodes of aerial combat, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, drive home the fear that haunts all of the subsequent scenes of the men on the ground. By putting us in the sky right away, “Masters of the Air” writer John Orloff runs the risk of alienating those viewers turned off by extended, often repetitive action sequences that revolve around gunfire. And the action itself is complex and chaotic, as it is in so many war movies; at times, it’s hard to determine exactly who is who on each plane, since the faces — even those of series leads Austin Butler, Anthony Boyle, and Callum Turner — are largely hidden behind air masks. For me, it worked; when the story does land for a while, particularly after several of the main characters become POWs in Germany, we more fully grasp the psychic damage and dread they’re carrying with them from the air. We understand the depth of their dismay as the official number of missions they must finish to go home keeps rising.
Over its nine episodes, “Masters of the Air,” which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, is more powerful as a whole than in its specifics. The midair spectacle (the result of a reported $250 million budget), the extreme physical hardships, and the atmosphere of doom are remarkable and poignant, the characters a little less so. They are just this side of archetypes, as they fulfill their duty against Hitler and the Nazis. Based on Donald L. Miller’s book “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany,” the story is told in retrospect and in voice-over by Harry Crosby (Boyle), who begins the series as a newbie and winds up a highly respected navigator. He is notable from the start, as he vomits uncontrollably midflight, from air sickness and from pure terror at his first taste of the chaos in the sky.
The show’s other somewhat distinct characters include Butler’s Buck Cleven and Turner’s Bucky Egan, two top-notch fliers whose rapport gives the miniseries — executive produced, like its predecessors, by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg — an overarching unity. Buck is low-key, strait-laced, and solid, Bucky is a louder, hard-drinking type, and theirs is an attraction of opposites who are bonded by their love of the air. Turner is particularly good in the material set on the ground, and his character has more texture than Butler’s bland good guy. Barry Keoghan makes a bit of an impression as Curtis Biddock, a New Yawker with a heavy accent, and Nate Mann stands out in the later episodes as Robert Rosenthal, who, in a daze, stumbles through an abandoned death camp.
Otherwise, there is a lot of blurring together and character under-exploration, not least of all when Orloff adds a woman or two and a trio of Black Tuskegee Airmen, perhaps to break up the endless procession of white men. The Tuskegee Airmen, played by Josiah Cross, Branden Cook, and Ncuti Gatwa, barely register, and I wound up thinking Orloff might have been better off leaving them out entirely if he wasn’t going to do them justice. For a war epic to work, for the deaths to have an impact, viewers need to have a stronger sense of the human beings whose lives are at stake. We don’t need to know everyone’s backstory, but we do need to know who they are in the moment of battle, and who they become the longer they serve. “Masters of the Air” doesn’t quite succeed on that level.
Like “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” “Masters of the Air” is fueled by patriotism. “Catch-22″ this is not. It is an old-school tribute to the Greatest Generation and to those who fought against fascism — wait for the hoisting of the American flag in the finale — and as such it can be moving. But the story, which takes place between 1943 and 1945, is not as carefully paced and effectively written as the previous two miniseries. “Masters of the Air” is a good, but not great, conclusion to the trilogy.
MASTERS OF THE AIR
Starring: Callum Turner, Austin Butler, Anthony Boyle, Barry Keoghan, Ncuti Gatwa, Raff Law, Laurie Davidson, Bel Powley, James Murray, Nate Mann, Sawyer Spielberg, Stephen Campbell Moore
On: Apple TV+. Premieres Friday.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.