Review: Masters of the Air, "Part One" & "Part Two" | Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2

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Photo: Apple TV+

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the Apple TV+ miniseries Masters of the Air, the third of three Playtone productions telling the story of America’s involvement in World War II following Band of Brothers and The Pacific. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To learn more about what we’re covering, see our winter schedule.

“Don’t say anything. They’ll figure it out. We all do.”

Hard as it is to believe, we’re just a few months past from the 25th anniversary of the seminal war film Saving Private Ryan. Though World War II films were abundant before 1998, Steven Spielberg is so impossibly talented that his depiction of the hell of the battlefield was both fresh and horrifying. In that film’s production, he all but tossed a massive ensemble headlined by one of the most famous actors ever into a real-life boot camp that translated into an eventual production that still ranks as one of the great films about war, shaky framing device aside.

You can draw a very clear, straight line from the wildly successful Saving Private Ryan to the new Apple TV+ miniseries Masters of the Air. Tom Hanks had already proven his American history bona fides, having starred in the masterful Apollo 13 and then producing the late-90s HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. But he hit his peak American-dad phase by starring in Saving Private Ryan and then collaborating with Spielberg to produce another HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers. That 2001 show not only introduced the world to a slew of soon-to-be-famous UK actors, but now serves as the first part of a spiritual trilogy of WWII miniseries. First came Band of Brothers and its depiction of “Easy” Company as they acted as boots on the ground for a wide range of harrowing experiences of the European side of the war. In 2010, HBO aired the underrated but equally powerful The Pacific, following American soldiers in the Pacific Theater of the war. Now, nearly 15 years later, we have another Hanks/Spielberg collaboration with Masters of the Air, depicting the 100th Bomb Group of the U.S. Air Force in the last two years of World War II, with a two-episode premiere arriving today.

Though future episodes are going to arrive once a week, it makes a lot of sense that Apple is releasing “Part One” and “Part Two” together. (Interesting, though, to note that each episode—at least on the screeners—ends with a “Next Time” tag; in the case of “Part One,” I imagine that “Next Time” basically means “ten seconds after this montage ends.”) Much of “Part One,” co-written by John Orloff and John Shiban, serves as setup as we watch our main characters gradually come together at a British Royal Air Force base in East Anglia and find out exactly how intense and challenging air combat can be. 

While it’s true that the deep ensemble needs to be introduced in due course, that setup feels fairly ungainly in the first half of “Part One,” sometimes unnecessarily so. Our two leads — if the two-episode premiere is a safe indication — are Major Gale Cleven and Major John Egan (Austin Butler and Callum Turner, respectively), first glimpsed spending a night out with their two sweethearts as Egan prepares to ship out as the air executive of the 100th a few weeks before Cleven will arrive in England. Orloff and Shiban deliberately don’t give us a day-by-day breakdown of those few weeks in one of the sharpest and most effective choices of the premiere. Instead, we jump forward quickly and uncomfortably to a nearly disastrous mission in which a plane on which Egan is observing almost crashes during an attack by the Germans. The experience of those few weeks is too hard to put into words for Egan or other men, one of whom says the line quoted up top. Other soldiers, like the incoming Cleven, will have to experience it for themselves; warning them won’t do much good. 

Aside from Cleven and Egan—one is nicknamed Buck, the other Bucky, but I’m going to stick with last names in these reviews—the other immediately important character is Harry Crosby, played by Anthony Boyle. Though we only meet Crosby after the extended opening credits, he’s got to be important because he’s our narrator. While it’s easy for a narrator to function as a voice of exposition, the voiceover in the premiere is used sparingly enough that I do wonder how much is added by Crosby’s presence.¹ When Crosby’s voiceover is establishing some key details about the 100th itself, it can be useful, but when he identifies Cleven and Egan as “the unquestioned leaders” of the group, it comes far enough into the episode that…well, it’s already pretty obvious that they’re the leaders.

Aside from being narrator, Crosby serves as a very clear counterpoint to both the charmingly straightforward and laconic Cleven and his more gregarious and soused pal Egan. Despite their personality differences, those two men cut a classic image of Greatest-Generation-era American heroism. Crosby, an up-and-coming navigator, is a smart and friendly guy himself. But whereas Cleven and Egan look like they were born to be up in the air, our narrator has just one problem: “uncontrollable airsickness.” That affliction doesn’t come in handy seeing as he’s…well, a navigator who has to help pilots wend their way through stormy weather and through enemy lines. In “Part One,” at least, you could wonder if Crosby’s gastrointestinal struggles could spell doom for himself and some other men. (If he wasn’t the narrator.) That said, though the climax of the episode centers around a mission gone pear-shaped, he and many of the other recognizable performers make it out just fine. Yes, there’s vomit, and not just from Crosby. But as much as puke and the threat of Nazis hover over the proceedings, that mission goes under because of how easily American planes could get jammed up or worse, due to the perilously bad weather in Europe. The lack of newer technology makes it all the more amazing that the Allies ever won the war.

At this point, I’ll identify that the expectations I had for Masters of the Air are high to an almost unfair degree. I adore both Band of Brothers and The Pacific, I find the exploration of World War II-era American history to be fascinating in many forms, and so many of the people involved in this specific series raise my interest. That’s an arguably double-edged sword, extending from the very recognizable leads to director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who’s behind the camera for both parts premiering today. The expectations of any series produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, of anything directed by the man behind the latest James Bond film and stylishly directed episodes of the first season of True Detective, and of anything featuring Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan…well, it may be somewhat unfair to judge such a series based on those expectations, but it would be more unfair to pretend like those expectations aren’t floating in my mind.

It’s a lengthy way of saying that “Part One” packs a lot of promise and potential without being truly remarkable. My hope is that in the end, a setup-heavy episode like this will pay off massively; we need to get to know all of the men who serve in the 100th so that their specific stories have a firm impact. Whatever else is true of the slow ramp-up here, “Part One” is solidly directed and compelling enough. For now, though, neither writers Orloff and Shiban nor director Fukunaga have mastered the style of past efforts like Band of Brothers and The Pacific. One episode in, Masters of the Air is reminiscent of those shows, but in a way that feels like its makers are aping a style as opposed to naturally following on what those shows built.

Photo: Apple TV+

Now, I alluded as much up top, but in considering “Part Two” let’s discuss the famous faces in the cast of Masters of the Air. This cast is not wanting for talent, especially very well-known young talent. It’s not just that two of the main characters are played by actors who’ve already netted Oscar nominations. It’s that one of those actors has made a name for himself in films ranging from WWII action stories to a brief cameo as The Joker in The Batman. (Spoilers for The Batman.) And, oh yes, the other Oscar nominee got his nod for playing freaking Elvis. Callum Turner has been in the Fantastic Beasts movies, and Anthony Boyle’s first big role was playing Scorpius Malfoy in the stage show Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. They’ve got credits too! But…not Elvis-level credits.

That Barry Keoghan was part of the ensemble of Dunkirk is something I couldn’t help think of, especially when poring over which pictures from the Apple TV+ press site to select. As I recall when that film opened in the summer of 2017, one criticism/sly dig levied at writer/director Christopher Nolan was that he once again couldn’t help himself and cast Tom Hardy to play a man wearing a mask that obscured most of his face. Now, unlike when Hardy played Bane, there was perfectly good creative reason for his character in Dunkirk to have a big mask blocking all but his eyes and forehead; that’s just how fighter pilots suit up. But it spoke to the potential challenge in that crisply directed film of being able to keep track of all of the actors across multiple timelines, especially those actors (like a younger Keoghan) who weren’t as well as known to American audiences.

So there’s arguably a bit of irony in the casting for Masters of the Air. On one hand, because of its lengthy production, a much larger audience can see Butler or Keoghan and know them from their film work. (Elvis was released in theaters a few months after Butler’s involvement in this series was announced.) In Butler’s case, especially, it’s helpful when Gale Cleven is up in the air on a mission in “Part Two” because his Western twang is very easy to identify. But so many of the other actors on this show aren’t as well-known, making it a little harder to track when all we have to go on in crucial setpieces are their eyes. That irony was equally strong in “Part One,” when Crosby’s narration identifies a lot of the men in the 100th being greeted by Cleven, akin to the lengthy tracking shot from Goodfellas where a young mobster walks through a crowded nightclub as voiceover identifies lots of other criminals. The difference is that you don’t need to have great recall of the other gangsters called out in that tracking shot. Here, it’s safe to assume we’ll see some of these men again, and potentially just the tops of their faces. Keeping track of their names feels almost vital to the show’s long-term success, at least for anyone who isn’t Butler, Turner, Keoghan, or Boyle.

Casting aside, a common throughline in “Part Two” as much as “Part One” is the aforementioned challenge of air combat in a less technologically advanced era wherein gusty weather can scuttle missions. “Part Two” also frames the issue of air combat through two different approaches: American and British. Though the Americans are utilizing a British base for their operations, they’re pretty much at loggerheads with the actual men across the pond, as glimpsed in a tense barroom conversation that spills outside for a one-on-one fistfight. The Brits do their raids at night, at least affording them the potential element of surprise. The Americans, however, do their raids during the daytime, which makes it a lot more obvious when they’re flying overhead. It also means we can see the troubles of heavy clouds or fog, or of cold so biting that some of the American soldiers get frostbite thousands of feet in the air. 

Aside from Fukunaga’s CG-aided staging of a mission to Norway that scatters some of the men—with Keoghan’s character Biddick being forced to crash-land on the outskirts of Scotland—it takes until the closing moments of “Part Two” to start connecting to any of our characters. I’m thinking here of the strong-and-silent Cleven, and not just because he has the benefit of being portrayed by a full-on movie star. As he, Egan, and a group of other soldiers watch a disturbing display of German firepower—one of their nighttime attacks on England—he notes that the clipped and haughty Brits from the bar fight were right about nighttime being a slightly less dangerous way to approach attacking the enemy.

“Why didn’t you agree with them?” Egan (reasonably) asks. “...Didn’t like his delivery,” Cleven says calmly after a brief pause. Even more than the monologue that directly precedes this exchange, in which Cleven explains that his father’s inveterate gambling is why he can’t stand most competitions and organized sports, this last moment accomplishes so much in establishing who Cleven is as a character. We know just enough about his upbringing, but dialogue like that (and the delivery of such dialogue) helps make you want to gravitate towards this young leader.

At this point in the series, though the ensemble is immense, it’s really the two dyed-in-the-wool stars who stand out in Masters of the Air. It’s not just that Cleven is a compelling and believable hero, or that Curtis is suitably raffish. There’s a physical sense of command that both actors exude, such that the camera and our attention just naturally gravitates towards them inexorably. Not having detailed knowledge about each man’s history means it’s hard to know for sure if Cleven, Egan, and Biddick will survive the entire war. (Crosby being the narrator, I feel safe in presuming he’s going to stick around.) As the disturbing faux-fireworks display in the conclusion of “Part Two” reminds us, there’s constantly the chance that one or all of them might get blown to bits in next week’s installment. But two episodes in, Butler, Keoghan, and to a lesser extent Turner are the magnets here. I hope they’re around at least until the finale.

Stray observations

• Re: Band of Brothers, it really can’t be overstated how big that show’s cast wound up being. Michael Fassbender! James McAvoy! Tom Hardy! Simon Pegg! Andrew Scott!

• “We are one of life’s great mysteries.” So sayeth the King.

• I kind of wish we’d gotten to see Egan break that narwhal horn, instead of just hearing about it later. Alas.

• Because I do not watch Yellowstone or any of its related series, I didn’t recognize Isabel May as Cleven’s girlfriend in the opening scene. I’m curious to see how much more of the series she’s in; considering she gets a credit in the opening theme, I have to imagine she’ll return, but we’ll see.

• If you know your World War II and/or Disney history well, your ears may have perked up in “Part One” when Crosby and a few others try to locate a so-called gremlin in their plane. Before they were the subject of two very funny sci-fi comedies, a “gremlin” was a term popularized by a British soldier in WWII that became so well-known, and translated into playfully animated characters, that Walt Disney himself made a deal with that soldier to turn the idea of gremlins into an animated short. That short never came to pass, but the soldier did just fine for himself. His name? Roald Dahl.

• “They like me because I’m Irish!” I see what you’re doing there, show.

• I did like the extended joke of Egan loving to sing despite being terrible at it, specifically because of how pained Cleven’s reactions are.

• After two episodes, I have to say: Callum Turner’s American accent is vastly better than Barry Keoghan’s. 

• I hope that I can chalk this up to my screener having slightly less current VFX, but the effects during Biddick’s crash-landing veered between fine and pretty rough. Considering the large price-tag of the show (and the fact that it’s coming from Apple), I would’ve expected slightly less cartoonish effects.

• I want to call out at least one case of nepotism in action—ground crew leader Sgt. Ken Lemmons is played by Raff Law, who very much sounds and looks like his father Jude.²

• The opening credits feature a lot of glimpses at moments from the entire series, including at least two notable performers—the Fifteenth Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, and British actress Bel Powley—who have yet to appear in actual episodes. Hopefully soon!

• Last note: while screeners are available to critics for the whole season, I’m watching these week to week, so as I type these words, I remain in the dark about the rest of the series.

1. I also wonder if it’s a form of foreshadowing that neither Cleven nor Egan serves as narrator.

2. MM here to note that there’s a Spielberg in the credits too. Oh, and a Cuse on the writing staff.