War stories deserve better than Masters of the Air

Band of Brothers, the HBO war miniseries about American paratroopers produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, begins with a sort of narrative hammer to the skull. 

"We came from a small, small town," says a combat veteran immediately off the top of the first episode. "And three fellas in that town that were [deemed unfit for duty] committed suicide, because they couldn't go."

Nine years later, their next entry — U.S. Marines-centred The Pacific — only took a few extra seconds to get to a similar point.

"We had no idea that we were the forefront of all this," a retired Marine says, over images of ships burning in Pearl Harbor and FDR's "a day that will live in infamy" speech. 

"The main thing was to stay alive."

But Masters of the Air, the producing partners' third and latest instalment, takes a slightly different route. Rather than launching with footage of soldiers, battles or history, the series starts off with two guys, Buck and Bucky, leaning on their elbows at a bar, riffing over the similarity of their nicknames. 

To be fair, framing Masters of the Air as flippant with its subject matter — a nascent American Air Force struggling through some of the darkest days of the Second World War — would be disingenuous. That opening scene's purpose is to starkly contrast between a pilots' experience on the ground with their screaming descents through machine-gun fire in subzero temperatures more than 6,000 metres in the air. A scene showing just that pops up moments later.

Any impartial watcher would say Masters of the Air, which is on Apple TV Plus, treats its source material with respect. Based on the book of the same name by Donald L. Miller, the series is obviously committed to truthfully telling the stories of its fighters, such as 100th Bomb Group members Maj. Gale (Buck) Cleven and Maj. John (Bucky) Egan — played here by Austin Butler and Callum Turner.

Like the book, the show pairs personal stories with the terrifying reality of air combat never seen before or since. The technology for full-scale bomber warfare did not exist prior to the Second World War. By its end, Miller writes,it "was already being rendered obsolete by jet engine aircraft, rocket-powered missiles, and atomic bombs." 

As theorists and commanders forced a basically brand-new armed force into existence, its airmen were ground down by that experiment. Early on, two-thirds of them would die or be captured, as many as 80 per cent of their planes could be lost in a single battle and, at one point, 99 per cent of pilots ditching at sea were lost, according to Miller. 

Apple TV's Masters of the Air grounds itself there, in pitch-perfect fodder for an anthology series that has, so far, flawlessly carved out a storytelling niche in one of the most jam-packed genres. But Masters of the Air doesn't continue the trend.

It's more than understandable why the series, filmed now nearly a century after its subject took place, no longer includes first-hand testimony, as its predecessors did. But without them, Masters of the Air takes a complete tonal shift.

Where Band of Brothers' commentary and The Pacific's tactical maps and mission outlines bookending its episodes helped tack on a certain sense of solemnity and awe, Masters of the Air has given over completely to just another story using its historical context for entertainment.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it is a significant downgrade — and especially disappointing if your standards were set by the last two miniseries.