Spielberg’s New War Epic Flies High in Ratings Whilst Crashing Hard on Any Moral Depth  

Feeling more like propaganda than a genuine attempt to display the brutality of warfare, Spielberg’s Masters of The Air may be an entertaining series – but it doesn’t matter. The horrors of World War Two have been done to death and now serve little else but as propaganda pieces to create sympathy for the world’s most powerful military.

Masters of The Air follows 100^th Bombing Group who take daring and every riskier raids into Nazi Germany. The show demonstrates the perilous, suicidal, nature of their runs and the massive losses they sustained over the course of the war. 

As entertainment alone, the show is a visual spectacle. It’s exciting, well-paced and filled with a talented cast. The main two protagonists of the show Buck and Bucky are played by Austin Butler (‘Elvis’, ‘Dune: Part 2’) and Callum Turner (‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore’, ‘The Capture’) respectively. 

Accompanying them are a Barry Keoghan (‘Saltburn’), Ncuti Gatwa (‘Dr Who’)  and Bel Pawley (‘The Morning Show’) and many others, all of whom mingle on and off the screen becoming as unrecognisable as a single ingredient in baking a cake – but all together work deliciously well. It is undoubtably a talented cast, one that manages to pull you into this period of time through the lens that Spielberg has over these characters.

Over the course of nine episodes, we follow these soldiers into the air and into the wild chaos of flak fire and planes exploding and dangerous escapes from behind enemy lines. It’s certainly an angle of the war we’ve never fully seen before, usually it’s the men on the ground and so for those train for ariel combat we are given a much different perspective. 

The instruments that ran one of the most brutal bombing campaigns in history. And while it’s meant to demonstrated as justified, it feels as though the creator of the series is ignoring much uglier truths – in the Allied campaign, our attacks were as undistinguishing between soldiery and civilian as the Germans. 

The series might have felt somewhat more relevant a few decades ago, when marches against war and the brutal atrocities committed by the West weren’t as common as they are now. Twenty years ago, when Band of Brothers was released, there was still a generation of war veterans living who remembered the war vividly. In 2024, that generation is now almost gone.

Replaced by a new generation. Not as much compromised of veterans and fighters but of refugees and victims numbering in the hundreds of millions. A vast increase of over five-hundred percent since the beginning of the 1950’s. Refugees displaced by American warfare and Western allegiances. Where’s their limited series? Where’s the show about Iraq? South America? Palestine? Ukraine?

Whether it is intentional or otherwise, Spielberg is quite happy to demonstrate America as a beacon of moral purity whilst happily portraying the mostly faceless Germans as well as enemies turned allies Russians as brutal, violent and apathetic without remorse or kindness. 

It’s propaganda plain and simple – give all the heart to the Western heroes who come always as liberators. This is a, partial, historical truth to the period alone. Since then The United States and the Allied countries have been a villainous force on this Earth. 

The series might be enjoyable and have some truly fantastic moments. However, this shows feels out of touch with modern theatre of war we current generation know. Furthermore, it is intentional ignorance to say that the Nazi were the sole monsters of the second World War and that the Allied countries, in their victory, create a better world. For a man who spends as so much time living in the past, Spielberg is blind to any criticism of his holier-than-thou Red White and Blue flag wavers.  

Perhaps Spielberg should spend less time looking to the passed and the heroes of yesteryear to the last twenty years spent in the Middle East and the horrors enacted by villains he calls countrymen. 

Masters of the Air is streaming now on Apple TV.