Masters of the Air: Imagine a bunch of people throwing up, including me

I'm writing this article under duress because it's not going to create anything new or try to make the world a better place—instead, I'm going to do the thing where a critic tears down the work of others rather than offering up their own creation to balance the scales. So here we go: I didn't like the first two episodes of Masters of the Air, and I don't think I'll be back for episode three. The feeling that the show might not turn out to be what I was hoping for has been growing in my dark heart since catching the first trailer a month or so ago—it looked both distressingly digital and also maunderingly maudlin, with Austin Butler's color-graded babyface peering out through a hazy, desaturated cloud of cigarette smoke and 1940s World War II pilot tropes. Unfortunately, the show at release made me feel exactly how I feared it might—rather than recapturing the magic of Band of Brothers or the horror of The Pacific, Masters so far has the depth and maturity of a Call of Duty cutscene.

World War Blech

After two episodes, I feel I've seen everything Masters has to offer: a dead-serious window into the world of B-17 Flying Fortress pilots, wholly lacking any irony or sense of self-awareness. There's no winking and nodding to the audience, no joking around, no historic interviews with salt-and-pepper veterans to humanize the cast. The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy. And pining wistfully for that special girl waiting at home. Butler clearly gives a solid performance, but the man's face is too perfect, like an Army Air Corps recruiting poster, with his tall hair and his cap parked jauntily at an angle atop it. He's pretty to the point of being a distraction in every single scene he's in. He noted in interviews that he signed up to work with a dialect coach to drop the Elvis accent he picked up while filming with Baz Luhrmann, and being notionally a cowboy from Casper, Wyoming, he wears his character's "well, aw, shucks" down-home attitude as comfortably as the silk aviator's scarf around his neck. But at least to this native Texan's ear, there's still a lot of Memphis coming out of the man's mouth. Every member of the cast has their 1940s-ness dialed up to 11—and perhaps that's appropriate, given that World War II ended 80 years ago and “World War II” is fully a period aesthetic at this point, with its own rules and visuals any audience will expect to see. But the show wastes no opportunity to ram home that '40s feeling—every room is dimly lit, and every Allied office feels like a ramshackle clapboard mess. Each scene's framing feels like it was carefully assembled from comic book clippings, with barely disguised CGI trickery to keep everything hanging together. Watching in 4K HDR was beautiful, but it also made me cringe repeatedly whenever a VFX shot with bad tracking or bad color matching would flash past. There's just nowhere to hide the digital-ness of it all, and boy, does it ever shine through. The overall effect is less like Saving Private Ryan and more like Sucker Punch—with a bit of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow thrown in.

Air chariots

One thing I can't criticize is the show's loving depiction of the planes our characters fly through the sky. Although it seems to be a common theme in reviews of the show, I won't include a screed here about the fetishization of war machines, because I think whining about that in a World War II miniseries is like being angry that a nature documentary spends time talking about trees.

As far as I'm concerned, a show about the Army Air Corps delivering ordnance down Hitler's chimneys can certainly be forgiven a bit of airplane fetishization—and, honestly, the way the camera lingers on the Number 41 Olive Drab-painted bombers is one of the few bits I wholeheartedly approve of. It's a quirk of human nature that we give life, even if just within our own minds, to the machines that serve us. They take on aspects of our spirits and reflect them back at us—their souls are our souls, and especially in a show like this, those machines are just as much characters as the people. Although so much of Masters is dumb, I can't get mad at the amount of time the camera spends on the Forts and their nose art in all its varied glories—that stuff all works, and it works beautifully well.

Barrels and waterfalls (of puke)

And that, sadly, is about the best thing I can say about the show. While my inner little boy was left suitably awe-struck as fearless airmen flung their eager warbirds through footless halls of air, the rest of me sat there frowning. The frown deepened with every CGI skybox and poster-esque shot of our rugged boys in flying leathers climbing ladders up to their Fortresses, with every perfectly curling bit of cigarette smoke and every pithy patriotic one-off. I didn't feel like I was watching an adaptation of real events, as I felt in Band of Brothers and The Pacific. It didn't feel like I was getting a peek into a secret world of high untrespassed sanctity where few dared go and even fewer returned. Instead, all I could think about was dwarves and barrels and waterfalls—because if Band of Brothers is Lord of the Rings, then Masters of the Air is The Desolation of Smaug: brash, loud, and shockingly empty of anything new or substantive to say.

Also, the vomiting. Dear Lord, the vomiting. There is a lot of throwing up in this show, folks. There's more puking in the first two episodes than in all of Band of Brothers and The Pacific put together—and it's not the polite, safe-for-daytime-TV the-actor-spits-out-a-small-mouthful-of-oatmeal kind of puking. It's full-on CGI-enhanced 4K-resolution multicolored particle-simulated firehose-of-chunky-industrial-waste puking, with multispeaker Dolby Atmos splatter effects and long, lingering camera shots of the aftermath that leave you enough time to visually identify what the character last ate. I'd never criticize a show for going hard on realism, but maybe they could have dialed the puking back just a bit?

Should you watch it?

The litmus test for whether you should give the show a shot is the opening title sequence. It's a solid 2.5 minutes of powerful music, stately airplanes, and achingly handsome men in uniforms. And it's completely serious, too—this is the kind of title sequence that you put in front of a show that isn't expecting the audience to have to parse a whole lot of nuance:

If watching that makes you excited, then give the show a shot—you might enjoy it! Just don't get any puke on your shoes. Because, my God, there's so much puke.