“Masters of the Air,” Apple TV+’s World War II miniseries, has been a labor of love in every conceivable way.
Even backed by Hollywood heavyweights Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman, who previously worked on HBO’s World War II miniseries “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” the scale of the project proved to be the biggest challenge — particularly how to bring the air war to life in a convincing way. And it took more than a decade and a change in network backing to get this project onto TV screens.
“Ten years ago, the technology wasn’t there,” Goetzman said in a recent interview with NBC News. “And we really needed the technology to be there for us to simulate all of these planes in the air doing these very dramatic sequences.”
The show, which stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Nate Mann, Anthony Boyle and Barry Keoghan, tells the real-life stories of the men who served in the 8th Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group over Nazi-occupied Europe from 1943 to 1945. The group eventually earned the nickname “The Bloody Hundredth” for the grave losses it suffered.
The show’s predecessors “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” tell the stories of the Army and Marines respectively.
“Masters of the Air” focuses on the dramatized but real-life stories of Maj. John Egan (Turner), Maj. Gale Cleven (Butler), Maj. Harry Crosby (Boyle) and Maj. Robert Rosenthal (Mann). Capt. Frank Murphy (Jonas Moore) who is also featured in the series, was my grandfather.
The limited series is at its midway point, its fifth episode released on Friday. So far, the series has received mostly positive reviews, with an 87% critics score and a 70% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
One of the big takeaways for critics has been the show’s cutting-edge visual effects, brought to life on the screen by Stephen Rosenbaum, an Academy Award-nominated visual effects artist who is known for his work on films like “Avatar,” “Jurassic Park” and “Kong: Skull…
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