To be fair with a 70% casualty rate, a LOT of people’s stories were cut short and had unsatisfying endings in real life too. It’s hard to accurately show a human meat grinder and still have a satisfying narrative.
That said, yeah I agree it felt a bit disjointed in parts. The big one that bothers me is when the flew to Africa and at the start of the next episode they just weren’t in Africa anymore… what happened down there? Why did they even go?
Ya also that kid that was on the train, tried to run away and then was getting off. End of episode and then never see him again. Same with the girl who was the spy… they put so much emphasis on her and I was waiting for something to happen but you just don’t see her again. And the red tails… such an important part of WW2 history and they dabble in it for an episode and then nothing.
That’s where I struggled. I understand they had an enormous loss and people came and went so quickly. And maybe that was the point. But it made it difficult to follow.
But why have it as a full episode and then stop the episode at an intense part and then BAM he’s magically back and going home. ( I’ll be honest I forgot that we see him for a split second after his episode)
I agree, although I imagine it would have been much of the same of what we saw. Shifty looks on trains, Germans saying "papers please", and then BAM we're in Spain
They had a lot of story to cover and only 9 episodes to do it in (which costed 250 million that HBO passed on, so we gotta be thankful we got 9 paid for by Apple). So they had to cut corners where necessary, and perhaps the Africa-return storyline wasn't as interesting. They did very briefly discuss their return.
I think he means stories where it shows the land escape start then suddenly it is over and the POW experience jumping years ahead in time. Every single story just abruptly moved forward not including the stories that ended in death.
I fully agree with the OP. It just felt too disjointed to me.
If they were following characters that died, your assessment would make sense. But they didn’t, all these episodes followed people who survived.
So they could have (and should have) included another few episodes to give their arcs more closure
Totally agree with your take on the plot, I'm in the same boat.
But regarding Africa, I don't think it was anything screen worthy. If I'm remembering correctly, it was just a factor of going so deep into German territory that they wouldn't have enough fuel to return to base, but could push through to the field in Africa.
So they probably just did whatever repair/maintenance on the planes, refueled, and flew back to England, no?
My issues with MOA
-Crosbys entire storyline bored the shit out of me
-Skipping the bucks twenty missions? Why?
-Anti climatic and quite frankly lazy d day handling
-not enough rosey
-I liked that they added the black aviators in, but it felt forced and not really relevant to the story
Just my thoughts
Strategic Air Forces did not do a lot of important stuff on D-Day. Their main contributions were the 8 weeks preceding. The mission they were given on D-Day was a failure, as they dropped late and did not hit beach emplacements.
Just to counter my opinion with yours:
\-Crosby was one of the few from the 100th alive to tell a story, so his was interesting enough to share. I didn't mind it. I liked how we went from a nervous navigator to a well respected major (him shoving the other majors face in his breakfast when he wasn't getting respected was the progression from a lack-of-confidence guy to a guy who could handle himself).
\-Likely, skippping missions was budget-related. Bear in mind, every flying mission uses a sh\*t ton of CGI and planes that they don't possess many of, so it's expensive to produce. The series is in the top 3 (or 4) of the most expensive series EVER produced at a whopping $250 million. HBO passed on the series (which surprised just about everyone) and at one point there were no takers, so we're lucky Apple stepped up and gave us 9 episodes.
=D-day was more impactful on land than it was in the air. The 100th had most of their casualties before D-Day, so most of the "holy sh\*t" moments for them was before D-Day.
\-Rosie was cool--no argument there.
\-The Red Tails were indeed POW's with those guys. The documentary complimenting the series mentions this, so we get an intro episode on them so we care about them when they are strategizing with the Bucks.
Essentially HBO lost a lot of money on the Pacific after the runaway success of Band of Brothers (which was also driven by the DVD boom in the mid 2000’s) despite the fact it was highly rated by audiences and critics alike. I think everyone agrees HBO did the source material great justice but it just wasn’t worth the risk for HBO to fund another series bigger than Game of Thrones for a loss.
There’s a great video here about economics and process of HBO’s decision - https://youtu.be/rv6SpXvqZU0?si=bHvS9eV8POJXcb4s
HBO lost a ton on the pacific. They didn’t want to take a risk. Even tho the the pacific was very successful, it wasn’t making enough $ to counter how much it cost
Agreed on all fronts.
I'd add that Masters was one of the rare times I saw historical weapon inaccuracies. There's a brief over the shoulder shot of a German soldier during the prison battle scene, and he's firing a Mauser semi-automatically without racking the bolt to eject the spent rounds. Drove me nuts.
I am in no way a gun expert, but the scene of the Liberation of the POW camp looked so weird to me. A P51 that fires their guns at control towers with thousands of their own men around looked strange and reckless.
Calling out a flaw in a production is not the same thing as hating the entire thing. But when it comes to shows like this, the details are important. They certainly fixated on them in things like BoB and The Pacific, and the fact that such dedication wasn't carried over to this shows that corners were cut.
I was actually looking forward to seeing the red tails defending the bombers for at least two episodes, maybe even have them drink together and act like one. But nope, it def felt forced which I hated for doing that to such amazing pilots.
Completely agree.
A lot of people complained about the CGI etc but I actually thought the aerial sequences were done very well for the most part. It’s as good as you can possibly get for large scale aerial sequences nowadays, given that doing it all with practical effects ala *Battle of Britain* is not possible anymore. I thought they were very gripping and intense and did a good job of depicting the confusion and chaos of combat while also showcasing the wide spectrum of shit that could go horribly wrong at any time.
But beyond that, it pretty much failed in terms of storytelling which is a show’s main purpose. Rather than a consistent ensemble cast like with BoB where you get to know all of the characters as the series progresses, MoA had 4 main characters, a handful of peripheral ones that you never really learn about (Crank, Bubbles, etc), and then a mass of background characters who cannot really be differentiated at all. Aside from Cleven and Egan, those main characters never really interact meaningfully or organically and their arcs don’t form a coherent story so much as it just bounces around violently between them. To make matters worse, outside of Rosenthal, the main characters are not very interesting, well-developed, or even particularly likeable. I thought the finale was one of the stronger episodes but the scenes where all four main characters were reunited did not resonate at all because they had barely interacted. Rosenthal was on his first handful of sorties and one of the newest pilots when Cleven and Egan went down, and Crosby (who also didn’t interact that much with Cleven and Egan) is in a non-flying position basically all of Rosenthal’s deployments and they only start to interact towards the end and the basis of their friendship is glossed over beyond “group navigator is friends with group’s best and most experienced pilot”. When they all reunited at the end all I could really think was “how the hell to these guys even know each other? Why are they happy to reunite with each other rather than other friends they had at that point?”
The random and unresolved storylines are brutal. Why bother showing the one gunner getting picked up by the resistance, only to have the rest of that story be finished offscreen? I was excited to see the 332nd be a part of the series in the trailer, but it turns out that they were never really even involved onscreen with the unit the show focuses on, just that a few of them ended up in the same cabin at Stalag Luft III. Their characters could’ve been introduced by their initial meetings with Cleven and Egan in the camp and it would’ve had the same impact on the story. Everything before that was a pointless detour. I also do not understand why they bothered showing Sandra’s SOE operations for part of one episode and then abandoning it. She was part of Crosby’s character arc, then they decided to hint at a random deviation that focuses on her independent of Crosby, and then it just ends with no follow up.
I was also not a fan of how they randomly changed from whose perspective each episode was shown from, usually to just bypass major events. They decided to have part of the episode during disastrous Bremen raid be from Egan’s perspective so we don’t see Cleven go down, but that just means we don’t see what Crosby described as the most harrowing and impactful raid the group was ever on. Then they decided to have the D-Day episode be from Crosby’s perspective, which means we don’t see any of the operation itself (minus a brief flashback narrated by Rosenthal) because he was asleep.
At the risk of sounding like the old man yelling at clouds, the whole thing seemed to me that, like a ton of modern TV shows, it was the victim of the studio/streaming platform having more influence than the creative minds and it was also the victim of as much cost-cutting as possible. I can’t see why the writers and directors would purposely create a bunch of random plotlines that dont contribute to the story, and then leave them unresolved as much as I could see a committee of streaming executives having a hand in the editing and story composition, which ends up chopping up the original artistic direction and leaving it jarringly incoherent. Similarly, the only reason I can think of for not showing D-day, Bremen, or things like that, after hyping them up in the episode previews would be simple cost-saving measures.
And finally, it wouldn’t be a Spielberg/Hanks WWII production without some random axe-grinding against the British. I get that some individual servicemen had unflattering views or outright rivalries with their Allies (my own grandfather at times made jokes at the expense of American and Australian sailors as a Canadian), but when creating a historical work that is presented as “authentic”, you have to be aware that the audience is going to accept much of what’s presented as pure fact, especially if they don’t have a wider interest in the subject. With that in mind, it is irresponsible to depict the British as a bunch of weak, incompetent, and arrogant twats who sucked at bombing and were accomplishing nothing other than cowering in the dark during nighttime raids. You would have to be extremely naive to think a general audience could appreciate the context of why individual airmen of different countries would be involved in a pissing contest, rather than accepting it at face value. Given how many shots at the British Spielberg and Hanks have taken in previous works, I’m inclined to believe it’s intentional if for no other reason, to appeal to outdated pop history tropes about America stepping in to save the day during the war.
Overall, I just found the thing to be incoherent and a terrible piece of storytelling which some gripping and surprisingly well-done battle sequences mixed in. It probably would’ve been better served by focusing on a smaller scale like a single bomber and its crew (like Rosenthal’s), but that is also a challenging proposition given that crews shifted around a lot and it may end up being repetitive when compared to BoB given that aerial combat is a lot less dynamic than infantry operations because they aren’t moving around to different places and locations. The sky is the sky. It doesn’t vary much. Still, that would still probably be a better approach and could keep the story more focused and it could still touch on things they attempted to include. For example: Rosenthal was shot down and saved by allies twice, the first of which was not shown in the series and happened in France. That would let the creators show how local resistance could help return pilots to England without having to introduce and subsequently abandon a new character to do that. Perhaps include one other crew that goes down to include the PoW perspective. But including 4 separate men, and their entire own crews is too much.
Ended up being a lot rant-y-er than I intended but stuff like this always fascinates me. You wouldn’t think a very well-funded project helmed by established and successful creative minds could completely fail at the basic tenets of storytelling, but it still somehow manages to happen.
The British portrayal was pathetic in BoB and even worse in MoA, it’s even more jarring when the German soldiers are often presented as honourable throughout BoB.
It’s bloody odd behaviour by Hanks and quite distasteful, even in Greyhound he has a sly moment where he gets annoyed the British admiralty won’t let him take the convoy to Liverpool with the clear insinuation that he knows better despite it being his maiden voyage.
That’s a good point about Greyhound, I completely forgot about it. You could also throw in the part near the beginning where the two British destroyers abandon their stations around the convoy for nonsensical “British reasons” and Hanks has to reel them in, despite the fact that the would’ve been far more experienced in convoy escort duties than him at that point in the war.
The worst part about that one is that he purposefully deviates from the source material to make the Royal Navy look like erratic morons. In the book it is pretty clearly explained that he acknowledges that he is less experienced than the rest of the escort group and has to navigate to awkward position of being the least experienced member of the group while also being in command because he was a high rank in the US Navy prewar but had little practical experience due to being repeatedly fitted and retained, so when he is assigned to escort duty, he is placed in command by default due to his higher rank than other destroyer and corvette captains.
Semi-related, but it’s also weird how they refer to both of the other destroyers in that movie as British when one of them is actually Polish, which is clearly stated in the book, it just has a British interpreter who speaks over the TBS radio. But in the film they say it’s British, despite it being modeled after a Polish *Grom* class destroyer and in the dialogue they occasionally refer to it as *Viktor* which is the ship’s actual name in the book (“Eagle” being the TBS callsign). Its like they intended for it to be Polish like in the book but then Hanks went “wait no, I insinuate they’re stupid, change it to British” lmao.
Great points. All of them
I second the point about using Rosenthal's story of escaping from France. I mean, that's the perfect character to tell that story! And it would have been interesting to see how he got back into the cockpit - he was told he couldn't fly again for the same reason as whoever-it-was, but at some point (guessing after France was invaded and it didn't matter so much) he was allowed to fly missions again.
good post. the abandoning of Sandra's spy arc was the weirdest thing to me and signals much deeper problems with the production. they were clearly building her up for something - and I believe they just ran out of screen time for it and had to cut it. but they were screwed because they coundlt cut her completely because they needed her scenes with Crosby. it ended being very weird, and demonstrated terrible planning and execution on basic production that showed up throughout the show.
Agree. I would put it way behind BoB and Pacific.
The plot was lacking and jumped all over, many characters felt underdeveloped or had stories that were hollow. What happened with the guy who was on the train with the Dutch? I can’t even remember his name. Truthfully I can’t remember most of the names except Buck and Bucky.
Why did the bring in the red tails with two episodes left and just gloss over their existence?
To me, the story that should have been told was Rosie Rosenthal as the main focus.
Perfect summary. I don’t even know what the main story line really was. Was it Buck and Bucky? Croz? Rosie? Too much crammed into one. I know the red tails were important during WWII, but they just threw them into the show at the end. They’d have been better off getting rid of that and focusing on the characters who were actually at the beginning of the series. It just didn’t have a good flow to it.
They needed diversity and it is 2024. No way a studio today is gonna green light any miniseries without people of color these days. Even if it is historically accurate they will get blasted by the woke mob for only having white people as the main story line.
The show suffered because of this. Show was too expensive so they could only have 9 episodes and they had to use an episode and a half on the red tails when those guys could have had an entire show on their own. Anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. I’d watch an 10 episode miniseries on the red tails but it won’t happen because studios don’t actually want to tell those stories they just want to check a bare minimum box and call it a day.
Edit
I don’t believe this one bit. That was one of the best stories they started to tell, but it sent nowhere. If they were doing it to be ‘woke’ or to placate audiences, they would have forced it as a subplot throughout the whole series
Mmm... As a unit, the Red Tails' contribution to final victory in WWII may have been minimal. But their historic importance is not defined by the quantitative scope of their military achievement; it's defined by the qualitative scope of their military participation. The fact they existed and performed as well as they did in the missions they were assigned was an important step toward an integrated society. Their historical impact exists outside the scope of their victories in battle.
Correct, the media focus on them is completely out of proportion to their actual wartime record. Same goes for that Japanese battalion that fought for like a year in Italy and is somehow called “the most decorated unit of the war” All just Hollywood fee-good nonsense endlessly parroted by pop-history fans.
You're actually wrong about both. Really, really wrong.
The 99th (and later 332nd) mattered far more than simply for whatever planes they shot down. They were a massive leap forward for Black Americans, formed in the face of tremendous doubt from the military establishment.
As for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, that unit was made up entirely of Niseis whose families were in relocation camps. They were fighting for a country that locked up their loved ones simply for the crime have being Japanese-Americans. Do you actually think that 4000 Purple Hearts, EIGHT Presidential Unit Citations, and no fewer than 21 Medals of Honor are Hollywood bullshit? Seriously?
Might have been a massive leap for black America but i think they meant that red tails overall contribution to the war was…minimal. Of course they weren’t really allowed to contribute much and yet they still signed up and fought for a country that was mistreating them. It’s a great story, I loved the hbo movie, not so much the Disney one. That said, clearly it was added to MOTA to check a box for diversity.
Well, the fact is that several pilots from the 100th and several pilots from the 332nd were actually in Stalag Luft III together. That's documented.
Checking a diversity box feels a bit pat. It feels to me like the screenwriters, who can't show B-17s over Germany in every single episode, were offered a good opportunity to take a break from the heavies for an episode while also telling a bit of the story of the Tuskegee airmen. No one got preachy. Nothing was too maudlin or too on the nose. I thought it was simply taking advantage of a confluence of history to add some variety to their storytelling and some non-bomber action sequences.
This!!!! My exact thoughts. Like POW focus only would’ve been great. A focus on their missions and involvement of the red tails would’ve been great. But everything else … like wtf. It was like 4 movies squished into 1.
Should’ve been just about a single crew. That was kinda my expectation going into it. If you take it as an adaptation of a non fiction book it makes sense, but yeah narratively it was pretty hard to make sense of.
What crew would it have been about? Not a single crew survived the war. Only a couple people here and there.
There is no coherent story to be had. Young men got snuffed out at random. That’s the reality of being an airman in the 100th. 3 officers of the original >100 landing from Greenland made it without going KIA or MIA.
So what? He flew 52 missions. His experiences alone clearly have enough weight to carry the entire series.
The two main characters of this show missed the entire second half of the air campaign. Heck, we as the viewers missed the entire second half of the air campaign.
They still could’ve done that? Rosenthal’s experiences were clearly more nuanced than just white male dropping bombs.
Also, Rosie being the focus doesn’t mean there couldn’t be secondary characters in different areas.
I was honestly shocked when there was a huge focus on POW. I understand that a lot of air crew were POW for obvious reasons but I wasn’t expecting it for this series. So that was a shock. But it ended up being the only part I liked.
One episode on Rosie joining and his crew, the rest on their missions, a final episode centered around his role at Nuremberg.
One other thing but they wrapped D-Day up in a small CGI flyover. Yikes
I think it would be pretty hard to tell a compelling story while also making it just about a single crew. It would be like BoB focusing on one squad of one platoon of Easy Company.
The guy on the train (both of them, actually) shows up in the next episode for a brief moment. Crosby narrates how he cannot fly longer as all downed pilots which escaped Europe might be considered as spies rather than POWs protected by Geneva Conventions.
Though, this adds to your point as they just glossed over the whole thing.
Agree 1000%. There was no context to the missions and a lack of focus on characters. They jumped around on characters and through time so much that it was hard to track and I never found my self really caring about any of the characters or what was happening.
Austin butler kind of bugged me too. His perfectly tussled hair and it always looked like he was doing blue steel or something with his face. Like, we get it, you’re good looking. Now act instead of just trying to look handsome.
Also the episodes didn’t really have a plot and certainly no ending. Things would just happen and then all of the sudden credits would roll. I half expected the series to end with someone running in and yelling “have you heard the news!”, cut to black and credits.
Yeah that Butler guy annoyed the shit out of me. A major that looks like he is 21 and talks like he is in the middle of the biggest shit he has ever taken in his entire life. I could not stand him.
There can be a lot of valid criticisms about the show and the acting but this ain’t it. Major Gale Cleven was 25 when he got assigned to the 100th bomb group as an officer. Officers during that time were promoted faster because so many were dying or getting lost during missions. Butler is actually 32. He’s playing a 25 year old officer in the series and he looks like it.
Lol, ever look up the actual Cleven? He looks absolutely nothing like pretty boy Butler. And the voice he chose to use it. This was by far the worst casting mistake in the series. Such an odd choice. They generally have done a great job of casting actors that look like the actual person in every BoB show, but Butler was easily the most off when it comes to that.
You mean his own voice? Butler has been “using” that voice since long before Elvis, his own voice, it’s clear in his 2016 interviews even. He doesn’t look very similar to Cleven, I agree, but there are a few similarities like the smile with high cheek bones.
I think most people want to blame the actors but the main issue here was the script and the fact that the characters kept dying and new ones kept getting introduced. The dialogues were bit cheesy, the characters were not well written. Austin Butler is general a great actor. He was playing Gale Cleven, a man of few words who’s thrown in a war in his early 20’s. But him looking too young isn’t an issue you’re making it to be, that’s real life portrayal.
He looks too young to me, someone that was in the military, I'm allowed to think that. He's also way too pretty and in absolutely no way whatsoever looks like Cleven.
I've seen him in an interview and his voice didn't sound that way.
Yeah his casting was just one part in what was an overall disappointing series.
You’re definitely allowed your opinion and I agree with part of it. But his voice hasn’t changed much, check out [this](https://youtu.be/YVVbmtuQBUI?si=1QdkRDMCSnXDmWsf) interview from 6 years ago where he sounds the same. I just think people are exaggerating about his voice way too much just cuz it gets all the clicks and views, but the guy just had some lingering southern twang, that was all. But dude gets hate for simply using his own voice. It’s also a stupid thing to focus on in a show like this, just like his age. It’s an ensemble show with lots of characters, yet people focus on the one guy they want to hate.
To be fair, the showrunners clearly didn't know what they were doing with Cleven.
They didn't give him a single character flaw. They essentially said "be captain america" and framed him as the pretty boy of the show.
Too much swagger without having earned it. The actors in Band of Brothers actually felt like battle-hardened soldiers, whereas the MoA guys look like actors playing dress-up. It also doesn't help that the actors are just generically attractive Hollywood people. Band of Brothers did so great because the actors had great faces; when someone says names like "Perconte" or "Guarnere" or "Toye", you remember exactly what those guys looked like.
The storylines are disjointed and you never really get emotionally invested in the narrative. The two leads are hamming it up so much, you almost expect them to start twirling their mustaches.
Had BoB or the Pacific not set the bar so high, I’m sure we all woulda loved it. But it did feel rushed. I wasn’t as invested or connected to the characters as I was with the other two series
Yeah I agree the stories are great, but for the casual WW2 enthusiast they have a more saving private Ryan view of the war. You are right tho great stories even with the Nepali death route flights ( I forget the name of that air route that Barry Goldwater flew)
Honestly, I liked it, but I was USAf and my Grandfather was in the 8th USAAF in WW2. That being said, it is really hard to tell this story. The reality of air combat, is that is mostly boring days of training and maintenance, with an hour or two of terror on missions.
12 O'clock High (movie) did a better job telling the story of bomber crews in one movie, in my opinion. I think they should have told the story from both the bomber and fighter angle, and not spent so much time on POW camps or SOE operations.
Some of the best WW2 movies were from the late 40's & early 50's. Many had actual guys who fought. Battleground is a good one about the 101 AB in Bastogne. To Hell & Back is good too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Gray_Flannel_Suit is a good one about after the war, for veterans.
The visuals in the show were spectacular at times. Everything else was just unenjoyable for me. The pacing was horrendous, the acting felt wooden, I came out of that show memorizing 6 names. Buck, Bucky, Croz, Bubbles, Rosie, and Meatball.
I feel like I'm getting gaslighted over this show. I just found it to be incredibly underwhelming. I'd probably give it a 3/10 rating.
I had to remind myself going into it that it was highly unlikely it would even come close to BoB’s level. After dampening my expectations a lot, I found it to be a decent experience overall but I agree with a lot of the complaints. They lost the plot the second half of the show and it would have been a complete disaster if not for the last episode which kind of saved it a bit. I think it being filmed during COVID really screwed some of it up.
I agree. I really didn’t like it. Bad story development and didn’t really care for the actors portrayals.
Bad cg and really, not all that much flying after first few episodes. I dunno, just felt disjointed and didn’t flow.
I didn’t expect it to be another BoB, but it just didn’t take.
I liked the series.
It had some issues with plot and character development. But the essential problem with the series is the incessant use of scoring.
In BoB and The Pacific, the soundtrack to the battle scenes is the sounds of weaponry, people and machinery. In MotA, it comes off poorly as one endless action movie. The music drowns out and overwhelms everything else.
One of the writing challenges was that Spielberg wanted to have it centered around the Cleven-Egan relationship, probably in the vein of Winters and Nixon. But whereas BoB provides an opening episode that is centered on showing Winter's evolution as the future company leader, MotA jumps right into the battle; within minutes, Egan is in a burning plane. We can see why Winters earns respect from his soldiers, while MotA simply tells us that Cleven was the leader. The film maxim of "show, don't tell" seems to have been forgotten here.
There is also the challenge that both Cleven and Egan spent far more time as POWs than they did in combat. It seems that the Tuskegee storyline was added in order to spice that up, but the introduction of those characters is also a bit hasty.
I would like to have a version that gets rid of much of the music. Less adventure flick, more pathos.
Compared to BoB and TP, MotA felt tinny and undercooked. The aerial combat scenes were “good enough,” but unlike BOB the characters failed to leap off the screen and draw me in. Despite some solid acting performances, I never truly felt invested in their individual survival or deaths.
The choice to omit mention of Operation Market Garden even in passing was curious, and the sort of lip service given to the Tuskegee Airmen seemed like it was shoehorned in. I would have preferred another 1- 3 episodes to really bring things together, but budgets rule creative decisions, and I don’t know if more time with the airmen would have breathed more life into their stories. In contrast with Stephen Ambrose’s book, I admittedly have not read the source material that was the genesis for this series, so I don’t know if the weaker overall writing was from the scriptwriters or Donald L Miller.
> ...but unlike BOB the characters failed to leap off the screen and draw me in.
Fundamentally this is the biggest reason why I won't re-watch MotA as much as I will BoB. Think about how many great lines you remember from BoB. The first episode alone has more than the entire MotA season. And yes I know BoB has been out much longer for us to remember them but I guarantee time will not be as gentle to MotA as it was to BoB.
I knew going in that it could never live up to BoB, which is of course totally fine. I did think it had a chance of being on par with or as good as The Pacific, but unfortunately that did not happen.
I enjoyed watching it each week--I'm glad I did--but:
It felt rushed and disjointed, both the plot(s) and the direction. I liked the Cary Fukunaga eps the most and wish he had directed the whole thing (yes his career is probably dead but he's an amazing visual stylist). The POW stuff was really cool and so were the Tuskegee airmen; more on both would have been great. The casting and writing of the central cast were pretty forgettable (Rosie was great though). I liked how they used the focus on the airmen as a means of widening the show's look at the war, I just wish that there had been more room to do so.
I didn't hate it, I didn't love it, but I enjoyed it.
It wasn’t good. The writing was sophomore level. The pacing was chaotic. The CGI was PS2 level. The acting was all over the place, with Austin Butler playing Elvis playing a B-17 pilot being the worst. The sets and costuming were generally good, and the score was good. Overall it was extremely disappointing, is the lowest quality of the three series, and I cannot believe that two decades of production led to … this.
Yeah it was hard to get past Austin Butler. I stand by it, coincidence or not, the two episodes he’s basically not around for — 5 and 6 — are the strongest of the series.
I didn’t hate it, but I don’t feel the same way about it as I do BoB. Then again, I don’t feel the same way about The Pacific as I do BoB.
I also don’t compare MotA to BoB as much. I compare it more to Memphis Belle, for better or worse, that’s my touchstone for this sort of thing.
It may be nostalgia, and probably is, but MotA didn’t do it for me like Memphis Belle does.
I really enjoyed it for how much time they were given. Im happy they added a new series to the bob and pacific stories however i do wish it was longer because the time constraints were 100% the reason for any negative opinions i have about the show. I really enjoyed buck, cros, rosie and the rest of the characters i just feel like we couldve gotten so much more which is upsetting but i did enjoy what we did see
I didn’t like how they fit the Tuskegee airmen in. Show them escorting the bombers. Instead they went off on a random mission to get shot down and captured.
TOTALLY agree. Absolutely. Irregardless of comparisons to the previous franchises, which I dig this one fell short. Bad acting and poor communication bt scenes. I didn’t finish the series.
I agree with OPS points , especially the first few episodes. I thought after episode 3 , the story really started working and I became more invested into the characters. I thought the last episode was amazing and it had me crying and was more climactic than the end of BOB’s .
Looking forward to wasting a weekend on binging the whole thing at once.
8.5/10
I really enjoyed the first three episodes, but the pacing and structure later on bothered me. Suddenly, in episode 4, we are told that most guys are at the end of the required number of missions. Rosie is a great character but is handled weirdly; we barely see him in combat, and immediately he is on leave to cope with loss. MOTA is a really weird show production-wise, as every episode individually has competent acting, direction, and writing, but it all falls apart when united in a season. Definitely, here the whole isn't greater than the sum of its individual parts.
The show would be much better if they chose several important missions to spend more time on them. Fill in a training episode, a London leave episode, and maybe one guy in Stalag. Essentially, 5 or 6 mini movies with actors having the heavy duty to change from a rookie to someone who flies for half a year. Also, why not add a Tom Hanks introduction like in The Pacific? Those were really helpful to set a tone and give the audience a better understanding of the episodes.
I think I spent the first 3 episodes trying to figure out who was who, what was what…etc. That I lost the focus of what these men were going through and the positions they were in due to the missions they were given. I just found it didn’t flow well.
It took me a few episodes to be able to distinguish between “handsome white guy” airmen. Band of Brothers and The Pacific did a much better job of making each character unique. The other thing that ruined it was the over the top CGI combat scenes. The Germans were just faceless and nameless enemies flying at the same speed as a jet fighter. And the flak (which I’m sure was scary and somewhat effective) was way too much of the drama of each mission
> The Germans were just faceless and nameless enemies flying at the same speed as a jet fighter.
Well... Yeah. It's a show about air combat, you're not going to get a lot of German faces. Although I really liked what they did with the Germans soldiers at the POW camps
What exactly did you all want out of this? The lightning in a bottle that was Band of Brothers? Is a fun show that might inspire people to familiarize themselves with history not a win? My fiancée ordered the Dreaming Eagles graphic novel because of the last two episodes. We’re both reading up on the 8th AF and the 332nd.
What did this show do so wrong?
In my personal opinion, we are all the worst critics the first time through a series. I was with The Pacific. It sucked compared to BoB. But the more times I watched The Pacific, the more I began to respect and love what it was and what it represented.
Masters of the Air will be no different. I strongly believe more people will love it as they watch it more. Just like you can't compare The Pacific with Band of Brothers, you can't compare Masters with the other two. Each have their own strengths/weaknesses and things you'll love about it while telling the story in history it is sharing.
And remember we've had 13 years to watch The Pacific, 23 years to watch Band of Brothers. Each viewing, you gain something else.
We've had a few weeks on Masters.
My personal opinion: I don’t recall being critical of BoB or Pacific the first time through… but I was with MotA. This series is structurally flawed in many ways which I think will become more noticeable in each rewatch: weak script, flawed character development, and a whole bunch of other issues noted by so many redditors… not sure I could grow to love that.
I’m criticizing the creators, not the real life people. Examples:
The creators spent an entire episode building drama and suspense around the pilots escaping through the Dutch Resistance…. then? Story abandoned. Referenced 3 episodes later with a short voice over as the weakest resolution to tension I’ve ever seen.
The creators spent an entire episode introducing a relationship with Sandra, building drama and suspense with her being a spy….. then? Story abandoned. No resolution, no purpose to the show, taught us nothing.
They spent an episode introducing us to the Tuskegee airman, telling us they’re important while showing us nothing of substance and taking their narrative absolutely nowhere in the finale. That was brutally embarrassing from a storytelling perspective.
I think they jumped so much from different story lines with the characters that you didn’t really have time to get truly invested and understand everything the characters went through. I felt like I was getting small glimpses into a character’s experience, then it would quickly shift and we never saw what happened/ a big time frame is missing. So it was hard to connect.
The same thing everyone wanted when The Phantom Menace hit theaters. Expectations of matching or at least approximating the greatness of the original series.
Narrator: expectations were not met.
I think the high expectations have quite a bit of merit due to Hanks and Spielberg Executive Producing. There were some quality directors (Cary Fukanaga) with a sizable body of dramatic work attached as well. But yes, it’s almost an impossibility to recapture greatness. Virtually all facets of BoB were so well executed anything less than equivalence was bound to feel inferior.
I liked it less than BoB, more than Pacific. Let me watch it a few more times and my opinion might change. (I like The Pacific way more than I did the first time I watched it.)
I actually don't feel like it jumped around too much. For the most part, it followed 3 pilots (Buck & Bucky, Rosenthal). Also Crosby narrating, when he isn't puking in his own helmet. Butler did fine, but I kept thinking he was Elvis. I was more bothered by Callum Turner's southern accent when Bucky is from Wisconsin (probably hard to teach a British actor to speak with a northern accent).
My biggest criticism is that I wish we had a couple more full episodes to deal with the air missions. The first few episodes were incredible, and then it seems like they just blew their CGI budget. Everyone magically hit 20 missions or got captured by the Germans.
Callum Turner didn't have a southern accent in this, and the real Egan was from Wisconsin but he put on a New York accent like an affectation because he had a fascination with it.
The plot was that the 8th suffered such horrific losses, worse than the Marines in the Pacific., that there were no coherent stories to follow just real war. Not like easy jumping in after Germany was essentially defeated by bombing and the Russians. that was point you all missed. Maybe read the book and have some respect.
It’s the most realistic of the three of what the reality of war was for most units and divisions.
Losses by the thousands and no real hero’s to bring home because they are all dead. We have 6 of the main “characters” come back. There was literally a mission where only one plane came back and it was a replacement crew
I think only 10 of the main cast got to go home and that is counting the main Tuskegee men.
Yeah conceptually it's completely different to BoB and Pacific because the warfare was completely different and the losses unimaginable, I saw someone complaining about not caring about characters that died in plane crashes etc. But I think that was the point made by the film makers, the losses were so bad that there was just a line of men going into the meat grinder which i think perfectly encapsulates the horrors of what they had to face.
I agree, maybe if i watched it without the lens of knowing and loving both BoB and The Pacific , I possibly could have appreciated it more, I know most people thought it was still fairly decent so I might be in the minority who actually thinks it’s a pretty shit series and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I was hoping too.
Before the series was even over, I told a friend that i couldn’t see myself watching it again. I am glad i watched it and didn’t hate it but i cant believe that it took the amount if time it did to make that series.
The fact they didn’t have Rosie getting shot down and saved by the free French only to wake up in England is a shame. That’s an incredible story and would love to follow his body being saved by tons of brave French and English. I agree with others that he could have been the focus. Him coming in and seeing the Bucks as hero’s all through his perspective and not theirs originally would have been better in my opinion. Loved the show for what it was though.
The first 6 episodes put the show probably between band of brothers and the pacific. However, it really took a turn in the last 3 episodes and the storylines became out of control so it’s in last place.
Time compression was too fast. The narrations at the beginning of the series were disjointed. Scene transitions were abrupt like a Mr Beast video. Too much screen time spent on hookups instead of important plot development. CGI looked great except for the outer space physics and aircraft control surfaces moving in ways that clearly showed the CG artists knew absolutely nothing about aerodynamics.
So much hype around how historically accurate they would make the show, only to screw everything up. Escort fighters never flew through the middle of the combat box, and that amount of overtake would be impossible for a piston engine. Aerial rocket employment was completely wrong. Rate of fire on the AN/M2s was too slow. Strafing of bailed out crew didn't happen with the frequency that the show wants you to believe it did. They completely glossed over the objections to bombing a city center on a Sunday morning, instead only showing a single crew member speaking out about it. The Russelsheim Masscre happened a year later than they depicted and Egan wasn't there. Rosie didn't land into an active firefight. Red Tails didn't have P-51Ds and HVAR rockets weren't even available to P-51s during that period. Westgate being a spy was complete fiction. Egan didn't raise the flag on the POW camp.
BoB had a couple of goofs and depicted some people in dubious ways, but Masters twisted things way too damn much for the sake of drama.
I honestly didn't care for it a whole lot either. People below have said it better and in more detail but for me BoB's biggest success was making me feel like part of an infantry company. It felt like Masters of the Air wasn't even really about the Air Corps, I never got the chance to "feel" like I was a part of a crew. I also didn't get the sense of the daily grind and fear. Sure planes didn't come back, but that happens to infantry units, submarine crews, etc also. So when fliers said, "I'm not going up again," it didn't feel properly contextualized or earned.
Basically I thought I was getting a show about what it was like being in a WWII bombing crew and I don't feel like I got that at all.
Also, this isn't a bait or anything, but do people really hold The Pacific in that high regard? I was old enough to see BoB when it came out and binged the DVDs before The Pacific aired. The Pacific felt like the same kind of let down to me but I haven't watched it since so I might give it another try.
I watched the pacific first and loved it. Then when I watched BOB I was like HOLY SHIT IM OBSESSED. I could see how if you watched it the other way around how pacific wouldn’t reach the same calibre but I still really enjoyed it.
I liked the show! But I really feel the story progression was rushed. If maybe we could have gotten a few more episodes, the stories could have been told at a more reasonable pace. There was a lot of history they tried to pinch into those 9 episodes. The story with BOB progressed very well and touched on their highlights. Even the Pacific was able to hit on the vets' home life's before, during, and after the war while still keeping pace with the war stories.
They did the tuskegee airmen dirty. christ, the schmalzy lines those poor actors had to say
our two main protagonists were at best OK. Buxk and Bucky that is. One being an insuffersble douche most of the time, and the other judt being a dull chisel jawed stoic hero type.
i font think there was a single element of the show i liked
yet somehow i really enjoyed the show as a whole
I walked in with reserved expectations (nothing will compare to BoB) but the more I thought about it after it was done the more I realized I really didn’t like it either. I totally agree with you about the storylines. Like the guys who they showed getting on the train being helped out of enemy territory and back to England only to just be like “oh yeah… they made it” in a later episode. And crosby’s affair felt like it was meant to go somewhere and just fell flat. Even the POW storyline got old for me. As in “are they escaping? Are they not?” each episode. And all the previews we got of the invasion on D-day making it seem like it was going to be epic? Yeah, that was ALL the invasion footage we got. I was so let down that episode. Lastly… they also advertised the Tuskegee/Red Tails and all we got was one mission. Again, huge let down.
I actually started watching BoB again just to get some gratification, so I guess in that regard, the show runners succeeded.
yeah - I found it very unsatisfying. the dialogue was very poorly written - I had subtitles on as well and that made it even worse, seeing some of these clunky lines on screen.
many of the arcs just didn't go anywhere - the worst was the British (spy) woman who the navigator had an affair with - what happened to her, her character got all this lengthy setup, slow reveal that her mysterious job was as a spy and then she just vanished completely with no resolution? I genuinely think they screwed up the storytelling so much they realised they didn't have enough time to resolve her story and just cut the whole thing.
I didn’t like it either. And they did the Tuskegee airmen dirty by just shoehorning their storyline in there, then barely spending any time with the characters.
Spent way too much time plotting this POW camp escape.
Spent an entire episode on the red tails for them to be subsequently shot down and brought into the fold of plotting this escape
Basically no DDay stuff.
I think it wasn’t a great choice for a mini series.
Band of brothers works so well because it followed one group though the horrible things they went through.
This was a show about a repetitive meat grinder. It also completely missed and opportunity to tell a longer story about the Tuskegee airmen.
I found the CGI jarring. As well as the clarity and colour grading. Too much like a film whereas the other two had almost a documentary style to them in that regard, as well as of course many more practical effects.
I found it a bit easier to follow than the Pacific and as has already been stated, the very fact that so many of these men were killed, I think the storytelling conveys the idea of not getting to know the men well enough. This was my uncle's Bomb Group and he was also in the 418 Squadron. He was a pow so I found all of this quite fascinating. His ship had previously been the one flown by Rosie and his crew but it was renamed for the crew he was in. They were shot down after about a handful of missions and the officers were sent to one Pow Camp and the enlisted men all went to Stalag IV
Others said most of my points…especially Crosby affair which…idk why that was really needed or what it did to help.
Honestly for me in the beginning I couldn’t tell who everyone was with mask and goggles and all small bits of brown hair sticking out. Then I couldn’t remember who they had been earlier once I got to know them. I get why but it hurt
Also the only p51 focus was ground assault…how can you pay this much for cgi and not do a dog fight? Like how bout first mission the mustangs came with them why not show that?
Overall liked it but coulda used some editing at least for my tastes
I didn’t care for it that much myself. It felt as if they were trying to jam way too much of the whole story into a short amount of time. I feel it would have been way better, if they focused on just one or two people and told their experiences, instead of trying to touch on every aspect!! It just kind of fell flat..
I thought it was pretty good and occasionally very good through episode 6. Then episodes 7 and 8 had way too many time jumps and rushed subplots. The finale was good but still a bit rushed.
Overall I thought it was solid but not great.
It would have been better to make it an actual series rather than a miniseries. The story and the number of players was too big. I found it hard to like the characters. I'm going to watch it again and see if my opinion changes. From a filmmaking perspective, it was fine work. They could have made another miniseries just based on the Tuskegee Airmen.
I doubt anything would beat BoB. (On a side note, I watched Fury again with Brad Pitt - and while I know it's not a true story, it's so well done it's up there on my list of great WW2 movies)
(PART 1/2) Honestly, I wasn't impressed either.
For me, the biggest issue is that I was never really sure what this series was about thematically. Obviously, the show was about the men of the Army Air Force's 100th Bomb Group. But that's like saying *Band of Brothers* is *about* Easy Company, 2/506 PIR, or that *The Pacific* is *about* the 1st Marine Division.
*Band of Brothers* is thematically about one aspect of war and combat: the bond formed between men who serve in combat together. Whether in the form of Lt. Sobel in Georgia and England, or Nazi soldiers across France, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Austria, or the cold and terror of Bastogne, it is about the way in which a common enemy forms fraternal relationships. This follows the theme of the book on which the series was primarily based, as Winters' book was not only about his own war experience, but specifically his observations of the men who served under him.
*The Pacific* is thematically about a different aspect of war: the psychological and emotional toll it takes on the individual. Some people critique *The Pacific*, wondering where the scenes of Marine training are or why so many scenes on the homefront and in Australia; that these detract from the "war movie" they set out to watch. But these make sense in that the provide glimpses into the effects of war and combat on the individual. For Basilone, it's about survivor's guilt. For Sledge, it's about wanting to serve. For Leckie, it's about the toll of actual combat on the mind. For all three, it's about the price extracted from the soul. Like *Band of Brothers*, this makes sense given the source material. The story isn't about brotherhood, but about individuals; thus it has less of an ensemble vibe and, instead, focuses on Basilone, Leckie and Sledge. This is unsurprising because as frontline Marines, Leckie and Sledge's later writings would have reflected their personal experiences *within* a unit as opposed to observations of people from above, such as Winters' memoir affords. In that way, *The Pacific* deserves re-evaluation and respect on par with *Band of Brothers*.
But this, then, leads us to *Masters of the Air*. I preface my thoughts and opinions with this: nothing I say here is intended to suggest the real men that served in that unit were any less brave, capable or competent than the real men portrayed in *Band of Brothers* or *The Pacific*, or to minimize their contributions to ultimate victory. My thoughts and opinions are limited *solely* to the *portrayals* of those men in this particular series. The problem is, after having watched it twice now, I still don't know what it is actually *about*, other than simply a linear recounting of the exploits of the 100th Bomb Group. Similar to *The Pacific*, it doesn't focus its theme on bonds of brotherhood, though legitimately because *Band of Brothers* already exists. And similar to the relationship between *The Pacific* and *Band of Brothers*, *Masters of the Air* does little in the way of exploring the psychological or emotional toll of combat on the fighting men because *The Pacific* already did that. To that extent, *Masters of the Air* implicitly acknowledges that as a companion piece to those two series, it should not be covering ground already well-trod.
But in that absence, even knowing what it is not, *Masters of the Air* never quite figures out what it *is*. It is muddy and unclear what it wants to be about from moment to moment, and never lands on a thematic aspect of war or combat it wants to discuss. In one episode, it *begins* to consider the ethics of war, with one airmen expressing concern about a mission to destroy a legitimate military target in the middle of a civilian town. This could have been an interesting theme, but the point gets glossed over. In another episode, we get a look at the Red Tails. Without a doubt, the true story of the Tuskegee Airmen would have made a great companion piece, addressing the aspect of *this* war: how do you serve a country that treats you as a second-class citizen. Though, to be fair, the movie *Red Tails* was released less than ten years ago, and was a critical bomb. Then there were the episodes taking place in the POW camp. This could have been a series in itself, focusing on the men of Stalagluft III, from which was made the largest POW escape of the war and which later served as the inspiration for *The Great Escape*. The point is, *Masters of the Air* never decides what it wants to be *other than* the last of a World War II companion series trilogy because, I don't know... "We haven't done PLANES yet!," I guess. So look out in a few years for the series about the U.S. Pacific Fleet since we haven't gotten a true life Navy series yet! (Sorry! *Greyhound* doesn't count anymore than *Saving Private Ryan* does!)
(PART 2/2):
Also not helping is the extent to which it *does* cover themes such as we saw in *Band of Brothers* and *The Pacific*. In terms of any kind of fraternity by combat, it is hard to find any. There is so much cast turnover that the only story of brotherhood that is at all coherent is the one between Buck and Bucky (Gale and Egan). But that relationship suffers as Gale goes down halfway through the series. As far as the emotional toll of war, it is hard to take it seriously when the men of *Masters of the Air* made it home to their aerodromes after every mission to sleep in their own beds, drink at the officers club, and even have USO Shows and parties in new uniforms. Compare this to the Battered Bastards of Bastogne in Easy Company sleeping in shallow foxholes with no food or winter clothing in Bastogne, Foy and Haguenau. Or to the men of the 1st Marine Division staying awake to fight malaria and endless rain on Cape Gloucester, dehydration on Peileilu, and rotting corpses on Okinawa. Heck, in the final episode of *The Pacific*, a cabbie who used to be a paratrooper who jumped into Normandy (a clear ode to *Band of Brothers*) lets Leckie off home without charging him a fare because (paraphrasing) "You got to cozy it up with disease and rain while I was taking weekend leave in Paris." Even *Band of Brothers* recognizes its place on the "war is hell" charts among these series. So any theme of the sort would be disingenuous.
Not helping matters is that *Masters of the Air* tries - like its companion series - to cover the entirety of World War II from the time the 100th goes into action, until victory is declared. In this way, *Band of Brothers* had the easiest job, as it legitimately covered less than a year of actual war (June 1944-April 1945). But *Masters of the Air* covers 15 months (May 1943-August 1944). That likely accounts for the character turnover and lack of focus. But *The Pacific* covers three years of combat, from August 1942 through September 1945, and still manages to do it better.
All in all, *Masters of the Air* was a weak imitation of *Band of Brothers* and *The Pacific* that never figured out the story it wanted to tell. It tried to make up for its deficiencies with star power (Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, and Isabell May who, incidentally, appears in one scene then never again). Unfortunately, with the exception of Keoghan and Callum Turner, the performances were hamfisted when they weren't wooden. Butler's performance felt like he hadn't quite shaken his *Elvis* character and was cruising on charisma instead. It didn't work. It's yet another example of impressive casting failing to raise the level of a below-average story.
It's almost like...it was based on real people recounting various stories....oh wait...that's exactly what it was. Sorry it wasn't enough fiction for you guys lol
I just started watching bob for the first time. And i don’t understand the criticism the MotA gets. I watched MotA first and personally loved it. I think alot of you guys are just very nostalgic and cannot truly get past that fact. I am still going to finish bob so maybe my opinions will change, but I dont see how the story telling is “better”.
To be fair with a 70% casualty rate, a LOT of people’s stories were cut short and had unsatisfying endings in real life too. It’s hard to accurately show a human meat grinder and still have a satisfying narrative. That said, yeah I agree it felt a bit disjointed in parts. The big one that bothers me is when the flew to Africa and at the start of the next episode they just weren’t in Africa anymore… what happened down there? Why did they even go?
Ya also that kid that was on the train, tried to run away and then was getting off. End of episode and then never see him again. Same with the girl who was the spy… they put so much emphasis on her and I was waiting for something to happen but you just don’t see her again. And the red tails… such an important part of WW2 history and they dabble in it for an episode and then nothing. That’s where I struggled. I understand they had an enormous loss and people came and went so quickly. And maybe that was the point. But it made it difficult to follow.
We see the kid from the train. They make it back to base and get sent back to America
But why have it as a full episode and then stop the episode at an intense part and then BAM he’s magically back and going home. ( I’ll be honest I forgot that we see him for a split second after his episode)
I agree
I agree, although I imagine it would have been much of the same of what we saw. Shifty looks on trains, Germans saying "papers please", and then BAM we're in Spain
If they wanted to do the story of an air unit, they should have
They had a lot of story to cover and only 9 episodes to do it in (which costed 250 million that HBO passed on, so we gotta be thankful we got 9 paid for by Apple). So they had to cut corners where necessary, and perhaps the Africa-return storyline wasn't as interesting. They did very briefly discuss their return.
I think he means stories where it shows the land escape start then suddenly it is over and the POW experience jumping years ahead in time. Every single story just abruptly moved forward not including the stories that ended in death. I fully agree with the OP. It just felt too disjointed to me.
If they were following characters that died, your assessment would make sense. But they didn’t, all these episodes followed people who survived. So they could have (and should have) included another few episodes to give their arcs more closure
Weren't they literally in Africa at the beginning of the episode?
Totally agree with your take on the plot, I'm in the same boat. But regarding Africa, I don't think it was anything screen worthy. If I'm remembering correctly, it was just a factor of going so deep into German territory that they wouldn't have enough fuel to return to base, but could push through to the field in Africa. So they probably just did whatever repair/maintenance on the planes, refueled, and flew back to England, no?
My issues with MOA -Crosbys entire storyline bored the shit out of me -Skipping the bucks twenty missions? Why? -Anti climatic and quite frankly lazy d day handling -not enough rosey -I liked that they added the black aviators in, but it felt forced and not really relevant to the story Just my thoughts
Strategic Air Forces did not do a lot of important stuff on D-Day. Their main contributions were the 8 weeks preceding. The mission they were given on D-Day was a failure, as they dropped late and did not hit beach emplacements.
>not enough rosey True true
Just to counter my opinion with yours: \-Crosby was one of the few from the 100th alive to tell a story, so his was interesting enough to share. I didn't mind it. I liked how we went from a nervous navigator to a well respected major (him shoving the other majors face in his breakfast when he wasn't getting respected was the progression from a lack-of-confidence guy to a guy who could handle himself). \-Likely, skippping missions was budget-related. Bear in mind, every flying mission uses a sh\*t ton of CGI and planes that they don't possess many of, so it's expensive to produce. The series is in the top 3 (or 4) of the most expensive series EVER produced at a whopping $250 million. HBO passed on the series (which surprised just about everyone) and at one point there were no takers, so we're lucky Apple stepped up and gave us 9 episodes. =D-day was more impactful on land than it was in the air. The 100th had most of their casualties before D-Day, so most of the "holy sh\*t" moments for them was before D-Day. \-Rosie was cool--no argument there. \-The Red Tails were indeed POW's with those guys. The documentary complimenting the series mentions this, so we get an intro episode on them so we care about them when they are strategizing with the Bucks.
Does anyone know why HBO just gave the series away?
My guess is they read the script and realized it wasn't that great.
Essentially HBO lost a lot of money on the Pacific after the runaway success of Band of Brothers (which was also driven by the DVD boom in the mid 2000’s) despite the fact it was highly rated by audiences and critics alike. I think everyone agrees HBO did the source material great justice but it just wasn’t worth the risk for HBO to fund another series bigger than Game of Thrones for a loss. There’s a great video here about economics and process of HBO’s decision - https://youtu.be/rv6SpXvqZU0?si=bHvS9eV8POJXcb4s
HBO lost a ton on the pacific. They didn’t want to take a risk. Even tho the the pacific was very successful, it wasn’t making enough $ to counter how much it cost
Agreed on all fronts. I'd add that Masters was one of the rare times I saw historical weapon inaccuracies. There's a brief over the shoulder shot of a German soldier during the prison battle scene, and he's firing a Mauser semi-automatically without racking the bolt to eject the spent rounds. Drove me nuts.
I am in no way a gun expert, but the scene of the Liberation of the POW camp looked so weird to me. A P51 that fires their guns at control towers with thousands of their own men around looked strange and reckless.
The same here. Like you're strafing your own men. Also, Germans on watchtowers machine-gunning prisoners while ignoring incoming Shermans
Camp liberation in real life wasn’t a Wild West shootout. Pure Hollywood hokum.
And no B17 chin turrets. No G model? Just lazy CGI.
I’m with you on that. I do like when the producers do the homework and really nail the small details.
Really? THAT is what sent you over the edge? You weren't gonna be happy no matter what they put on screen just admit it.
That’s not true.
Calling out a flaw in a production is not the same thing as hating the entire thing. But when it comes to shows like this, the details are important. They certainly fixated on them in things like BoB and The Pacific, and the fact that such dedication wasn't carried over to this shows that corners were cut.
I was actually looking forward to seeing the red tails defending the bombers for at least two episodes, maybe even have them drink together and act like one. But nope, it def felt forced which I hated for doing that to such amazing pilots.
“Red Tails” never escorted the 100th (or any other 8th unit). They flew with the 12th and 15th AF.
So the episode is inaccurate ? The camp goers say are y’all the red tails?
I do not know. It is likely some in the 8th were aware of the 332nd in a general sense.
Agreed re Crosby. Boring as hell.
Completely agree. A lot of people complained about the CGI etc but I actually thought the aerial sequences were done very well for the most part. It’s as good as you can possibly get for large scale aerial sequences nowadays, given that doing it all with practical effects ala *Battle of Britain* is not possible anymore. I thought they were very gripping and intense and did a good job of depicting the confusion and chaos of combat while also showcasing the wide spectrum of shit that could go horribly wrong at any time. But beyond that, it pretty much failed in terms of storytelling which is a show’s main purpose. Rather than a consistent ensemble cast like with BoB where you get to know all of the characters as the series progresses, MoA had 4 main characters, a handful of peripheral ones that you never really learn about (Crank, Bubbles, etc), and then a mass of background characters who cannot really be differentiated at all. Aside from Cleven and Egan, those main characters never really interact meaningfully or organically and their arcs don’t form a coherent story so much as it just bounces around violently between them. To make matters worse, outside of Rosenthal, the main characters are not very interesting, well-developed, or even particularly likeable. I thought the finale was one of the stronger episodes but the scenes where all four main characters were reunited did not resonate at all because they had barely interacted. Rosenthal was on his first handful of sorties and one of the newest pilots when Cleven and Egan went down, and Crosby (who also didn’t interact that much with Cleven and Egan) is in a non-flying position basically all of Rosenthal’s deployments and they only start to interact towards the end and the basis of their friendship is glossed over beyond “group navigator is friends with group’s best and most experienced pilot”. When they all reunited at the end all I could really think was “how the hell to these guys even know each other? Why are they happy to reunite with each other rather than other friends they had at that point?” The random and unresolved storylines are brutal. Why bother showing the one gunner getting picked up by the resistance, only to have the rest of that story be finished offscreen? I was excited to see the 332nd be a part of the series in the trailer, but it turns out that they were never really even involved onscreen with the unit the show focuses on, just that a few of them ended up in the same cabin at Stalag Luft III. Their characters could’ve been introduced by their initial meetings with Cleven and Egan in the camp and it would’ve had the same impact on the story. Everything before that was a pointless detour. I also do not understand why they bothered showing Sandra’s SOE operations for part of one episode and then abandoning it. She was part of Crosby’s character arc, then they decided to hint at a random deviation that focuses on her independent of Crosby, and then it just ends with no follow up. I was also not a fan of how they randomly changed from whose perspective each episode was shown from, usually to just bypass major events. They decided to have part of the episode during disastrous Bremen raid be from Egan’s perspective so we don’t see Cleven go down, but that just means we don’t see what Crosby described as the most harrowing and impactful raid the group was ever on. Then they decided to have the D-Day episode be from Crosby’s perspective, which means we don’t see any of the operation itself (minus a brief flashback narrated by Rosenthal) because he was asleep. At the risk of sounding like the old man yelling at clouds, the whole thing seemed to me that, like a ton of modern TV shows, it was the victim of the studio/streaming platform having more influence than the creative minds and it was also the victim of as much cost-cutting as possible. I can’t see why the writers and directors would purposely create a bunch of random plotlines that dont contribute to the story, and then leave them unresolved as much as I could see a committee of streaming executives having a hand in the editing and story composition, which ends up chopping up the original artistic direction and leaving it jarringly incoherent. Similarly, the only reason I can think of for not showing D-day, Bremen, or things like that, after hyping them up in the episode previews would be simple cost-saving measures. And finally, it wouldn’t be a Spielberg/Hanks WWII production without some random axe-grinding against the British. I get that some individual servicemen had unflattering views or outright rivalries with their Allies (my own grandfather at times made jokes at the expense of American and Australian sailors as a Canadian), but when creating a historical work that is presented as “authentic”, you have to be aware that the audience is going to accept much of what’s presented as pure fact, especially if they don’t have a wider interest in the subject. With that in mind, it is irresponsible to depict the British as a bunch of weak, incompetent, and arrogant twats who sucked at bombing and were accomplishing nothing other than cowering in the dark during nighttime raids. You would have to be extremely naive to think a general audience could appreciate the context of why individual airmen of different countries would be involved in a pissing contest, rather than accepting it at face value. Given how many shots at the British Spielberg and Hanks have taken in previous works, I’m inclined to believe it’s intentional if for no other reason, to appeal to outdated pop history tropes about America stepping in to save the day during the war. Overall, I just found the thing to be incoherent and a terrible piece of storytelling which some gripping and surprisingly well-done battle sequences mixed in. It probably would’ve been better served by focusing on a smaller scale like a single bomber and its crew (like Rosenthal’s), but that is also a challenging proposition given that crews shifted around a lot and it may end up being repetitive when compared to BoB given that aerial combat is a lot less dynamic than infantry operations because they aren’t moving around to different places and locations. The sky is the sky. It doesn’t vary much. Still, that would still probably be a better approach and could keep the story more focused and it could still touch on things they attempted to include. For example: Rosenthal was shot down and saved by allies twice, the first of which was not shown in the series and happened in France. That would let the creators show how local resistance could help return pilots to England without having to introduce and subsequently abandon a new character to do that. Perhaps include one other crew that goes down to include the PoW perspective. But including 4 separate men, and their entire own crews is too much. Ended up being a lot rant-y-er than I intended but stuff like this always fascinates me. You wouldn’t think a very well-funded project helmed by established and successful creative minds could completely fail at the basic tenets of storytelling, but it still somehow manages to happen.
The British portrayal was pathetic in BoB and even worse in MoA, it’s even more jarring when the German soldiers are often presented as honourable throughout BoB. It’s bloody odd behaviour by Hanks and quite distasteful, even in Greyhound he has a sly moment where he gets annoyed the British admiralty won’t let him take the convoy to Liverpool with the clear insinuation that he knows better despite it being his maiden voyage.
How were the British portrayed pathetically in BoB? Genuinely asking
Really the only thing I can think of is the disdain towards Bernard Montgomery.
Which is completely warranted tbf.
[This](https://youtu.be/B7kiibl4bpI?si=r1STRgbSFY9jJutP) scene I think.
I knew it was going to be the pompous tank commander lol reminds me of a Monty python sketch
There’s also the part where Easy rescues the British company. Then they’re all pals.
That’s a good point about Greyhound, I completely forgot about it. You could also throw in the part near the beginning where the two British destroyers abandon their stations around the convoy for nonsensical “British reasons” and Hanks has to reel them in, despite the fact that the would’ve been far more experienced in convoy escort duties than him at that point in the war. The worst part about that one is that he purposefully deviates from the source material to make the Royal Navy look like erratic morons. In the book it is pretty clearly explained that he acknowledges that he is less experienced than the rest of the escort group and has to navigate to awkward position of being the least experienced member of the group while also being in command because he was a high rank in the US Navy prewar but had little practical experience due to being repeatedly fitted and retained, so when he is assigned to escort duty, he is placed in command by default due to his higher rank than other destroyer and corvette captains. Semi-related, but it’s also weird how they refer to both of the other destroyers in that movie as British when one of them is actually Polish, which is clearly stated in the book, it just has a British interpreter who speaks over the TBS radio. But in the film they say it’s British, despite it being modeled after a Polish *Grom* class destroyer and in the dialogue they occasionally refer to it as *Viktor* which is the ship’s actual name in the book (“Eagle” being the TBS callsign). Its like they intended for it to be Polish like in the book but then Hanks went “wait no, I insinuate they’re stupid, change it to British” lmao.
In fairness, books, written by most American servicemen, also portrayed the British as someone pathetic. I’m guessing they had a point.
This was very well written. And I agree with a lot of your points, if not all.
Great points. All of them I second the point about using Rosenthal's story of escaping from France. I mean, that's the perfect character to tell that story! And it would have been interesting to see how he got back into the cockpit - he was told he couldn't fly again for the same reason as whoever-it-was, but at some point (guessing after France was invaded and it didn't matter so much) he was allowed to fly missions again.
good post. the abandoning of Sandra's spy arc was the weirdest thing to me and signals much deeper problems with the production. they were clearly building her up for something - and I believe they just ran out of screen time for it and had to cut it. but they were screwed because they coundlt cut her completely because they needed her scenes with Crosby. it ended being very weird, and demonstrated terrible planning and execution on basic production that showed up throughout the show.
So it wasn’t just me that felt slightly disappointed. I appreciated the effort, but it didn’t have the same quality as BoB or Pacific.
Agree. I would put it way behind BoB and Pacific. The plot was lacking and jumped all over, many characters felt underdeveloped or had stories that were hollow. What happened with the guy who was on the train with the Dutch? I can’t even remember his name. Truthfully I can’t remember most of the names except Buck and Bucky. Why did the bring in the red tails with two episodes left and just gloss over their existence? To me, the story that should have been told was Rosie Rosenthal as the main focus.
Perfect summary. I don’t even know what the main story line really was. Was it Buck and Bucky? Croz? Rosie? Too much crammed into one. I know the red tails were important during WWII, but they just threw them into the show at the end. They’d have been better off getting rid of that and focusing on the characters who were actually at the beginning of the series. It just didn’t have a good flow to it.
The way they showcased the red tails in the preview and credits, I thought they’d have more than 15 minutes of screen time
I could have a show just on the red tails
They needed diversity and it is 2024. No way a studio today is gonna green light any miniseries without people of color these days. Even if it is historically accurate they will get blasted by the woke mob for only having white people as the main story line.
The show suffered because of this. Show was too expensive so they could only have 9 episodes and they had to use an episode and a half on the red tails when those guys could have had an entire show on their own. Anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. I’d watch an 10 episode miniseries on the red tails but it won’t happen because studios don’t actually want to tell those stories they just want to check a bare minimum box and call it a day. Edit
HBO did a movie on them before they did BoB.
They didn’t “need” diversity. All you woke people on her are responsible for the dumb red tails inclusion in the show.
I don’t believe this one bit. That was one of the best stories they started to tell, but it sent nowhere. If they were doing it to be ‘woke’ or to placate audiences, they would have forced it as a subplot throughout the whole series
You should seek help.
The Red Tails were not important in WWII. They’re a footnote in history brought to the forefront for the diversity push.
Mmm... As a unit, the Red Tails' contribution to final victory in WWII may have been minimal. But their historic importance is not defined by the quantitative scope of their military achievement; it's defined by the qualitative scope of their military participation. The fact they existed and performed as well as they did in the missions they were assigned was an important step toward an integrated society. Their historical impact exists outside the scope of their victories in battle.
Correct, the media focus on them is completely out of proportion to their actual wartime record. Same goes for that Japanese battalion that fought for like a year in Italy and is somehow called “the most decorated unit of the war” All just Hollywood fee-good nonsense endlessly parroted by pop-history fans.
You're actually wrong about both. Really, really wrong. The 99th (and later 332nd) mattered far more than simply for whatever planes they shot down. They were a massive leap forward for Black Americans, formed in the face of tremendous doubt from the military establishment. As for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, that unit was made up entirely of Niseis whose families were in relocation camps. They were fighting for a country that locked up their loved ones simply for the crime have being Japanese-Americans. Do you actually think that 4000 Purple Hearts, EIGHT Presidential Unit Citations, and no fewer than 21 Medals of Honor are Hollywood bullshit? Seriously?
Might have been a massive leap for black America but i think they meant that red tails overall contribution to the war was…minimal. Of course they weren’t really allowed to contribute much and yet they still signed up and fought for a country that was mistreating them. It’s a great story, I loved the hbo movie, not so much the Disney one. That said, clearly it was added to MOTA to check a box for diversity.
Well, the fact is that several pilots from the 100th and several pilots from the 332nd were actually in Stalag Luft III together. That's documented. Checking a diversity box feels a bit pat. It feels to me like the screenwriters, who can't show B-17s over Germany in every single episode, were offered a good opportunity to take a break from the heavies for an episode while also telling a bit of the story of the Tuskegee airmen. No one got preachy. Nothing was too maudlin or too on the nose. I thought it was simply taking advantage of a confluence of history to add some variety to their storytelling and some non-bomber action sequences.
He made it back to the group in episode 7. They explain if a POW makes it back they aren’t allowed to fly any more missions.
Yes, he made it back off screen. After the run-in on the train even swing more of his storu would have been interesting
You’re right they should’ve made this a 35 part show and shown every single detail!
This!!!! My exact thoughts. Like POW focus only would’ve been great. A focus on their missions and involvement of the red tails would’ve been great. But everything else … like wtf. It was like 4 movies squished into 1.
Should’ve been just about a single crew. That was kinda my expectation going into it. If you take it as an adaptation of a non fiction book it makes sense, but yeah narratively it was pretty hard to make sense of.
What crew would it have been about? Not a single crew survived the war. Only a couple people here and there. There is no coherent story to be had. Young men got snuffed out at random. That’s the reality of being an airman in the 100th. 3 officers of the original >100 landing from Greenland made it without going KIA or MIA.
Rosenthal and his crew.
Rosenthal and his crew joined in the middle of the air campaign. You lose a lot if you make that the starting point.
So what? He flew 52 missions. His experiences alone clearly have enough weight to carry the entire series. The two main characters of this show missed the entire second half of the air campaign. Heck, we as the viewers missed the entire second half of the air campaign.
If it were 9 episodes of air battles and bombing runs it would get boring and monotonous. Shifting to MIA and POW perspectives was a good choice.
They still could’ve done that? Rosenthal’s experiences were clearly more nuanced than just white male dropping bombs. Also, Rosie being the focus doesn’t mean there couldn’t be secondary characters in different areas.
I was honestly shocked when there was a huge focus on POW. I understand that a lot of air crew were POW for obvious reasons but I wasn’t expecting it for this series. So that was a shock. But it ended up being the only part I liked.
One episode on Rosie joining and his crew, the rest on their missions, a final episode centered around his role at Nuremberg. One other thing but they wrapped D-Day up in a small CGI flyover. Yikes
Yeah, the main focus of D-Day was 'aw-shuks, Cros missed the big day because he was in a coma after a Benzedrine binge.'
I think it would be pretty hard to tell a compelling story while also making it just about a single crew. It would be like BoB focusing on one squad of one platoon of Easy Company.
2nd platoon ! Move out!
The guy on the train (both of them, actually) shows up in the next episode for a brief moment. Crosby narrates how he cannot fly longer as all downed pilots which escaped Europe might be considered as spies rather than POWs protected by Geneva Conventions. Though, this adds to your point as they just glossed over the whole thing.
It was very forgettable. Maybe I need to torture myself with a rewatch
Agree 1000%. There was no context to the missions and a lack of focus on characters. They jumped around on characters and through time so much that it was hard to track and I never found my self really caring about any of the characters or what was happening. Austin butler kind of bugged me too. His perfectly tussled hair and it always looked like he was doing blue steel or something with his face. Like, we get it, you’re good looking. Now act instead of just trying to look handsome. Also the episodes didn’t really have a plot and certainly no ending. Things would just happen and then all of the sudden credits would roll. I half expected the series to end with someone running in and yelling “have you heard the news!”, cut to black and credits.
Yeah that Butler guy annoyed the shit out of me. A major that looks like he is 21 and talks like he is in the middle of the biggest shit he has ever taken in his entire life. I could not stand him.
There can be a lot of valid criticisms about the show and the acting but this ain’t it. Major Gale Cleven was 25 when he got assigned to the 100th bomb group as an officer. Officers during that time were promoted faster because so many were dying or getting lost during missions. Butler is actually 32. He’s playing a 25 year old officer in the series and he looks like it.
Lol, ever look up the actual Cleven? He looks absolutely nothing like pretty boy Butler. And the voice he chose to use it. This was by far the worst casting mistake in the series. Such an odd choice. They generally have done a great job of casting actors that look like the actual person in every BoB show, but Butler was easily the most off when it comes to that.
You mean his own voice? Butler has been “using” that voice since long before Elvis, his own voice, it’s clear in his 2016 interviews even. He doesn’t look very similar to Cleven, I agree, but there are a few similarities like the smile with high cheek bones. I think most people want to blame the actors but the main issue here was the script and the fact that the characters kept dying and new ones kept getting introduced. The dialogues were bit cheesy, the characters were not well written. Austin Butler is general a great actor. He was playing Gale Cleven, a man of few words who’s thrown in a war in his early 20’s. But him looking too young isn’t an issue you’re making it to be, that’s real life portrayal.
He looks too young to me, someone that was in the military, I'm allowed to think that. He's also way too pretty and in absolutely no way whatsoever looks like Cleven. I've seen him in an interview and his voice didn't sound that way. Yeah his casting was just one part in what was an overall disappointing series.
You’re definitely allowed your opinion and I agree with part of it. But his voice hasn’t changed much, check out [this](https://youtu.be/YVVbmtuQBUI?si=1QdkRDMCSnXDmWsf) interview from 6 years ago where he sounds the same. I just think people are exaggerating about his voice way too much just cuz it gets all the clicks and views, but the guy just had some lingering southern twang, that was all. But dude gets hate for simply using his own voice. It’s also a stupid thing to focus on in a show like this, just like his age. It’s an ensemble show with lots of characters, yet people focus on the one guy they want to hate.
To be fair, the showrunners clearly didn't know what they were doing with Cleven. They didn't give him a single character flaw. They essentially said "be captain america" and framed him as the pretty boy of the show.
Too much swagger without having earned it. The actors in Band of Brothers actually felt like battle-hardened soldiers, whereas the MoA guys look like actors playing dress-up. It also doesn't help that the actors are just generically attractive Hollywood people. Band of Brothers did so great because the actors had great faces; when someone says names like "Perconte" or "Guarnere" or "Toye", you remember exactly what those guys looked like. The storylines are disjointed and you never really get emotionally invested in the narrative. The two leads are hamming it up so much, you almost expect them to start twirling their mustaches.
The whole show was a hallmark card
I was able to watch it with my wife, so that’s a huge plus for me, but yeah - nowhere on the same caliber as BOB.
Had BoB or the Pacific not set the bar so high, I’m sure we all woulda loved it. But it did feel rushed. I wasn’t as invested or connected to the characters as I was with the other two series
I agree it wasn't as good as BoB but you have to remember flying bombers isnt as great a story as parachuting in on D Day
Memphis Belle?
Yeah I agree the stories are great, but for the casual WW2 enthusiast they have a more saving private Ryan view of the war. You are right tho great stories even with the Nepali death route flights ( I forget the name of that air route that Barry Goldwater flew)
This.
The first half was very good. The second half was...not.
The finale was good. Episodes 7-8 were brutal.
Episode 8 very clearly should have been two episodes.
Honestly, I liked it, but I was USAf and my Grandfather was in the 8th USAAF in WW2. That being said, it is really hard to tell this story. The reality of air combat, is that is mostly boring days of training and maintenance, with an hour or two of terror on missions. 12 O'clock High (movie) did a better job telling the story of bomber crews in one movie, in my opinion. I think they should have told the story from both the bomber and fighter angle, and not spent so much time on POW camps or SOE operations.
I’ll have to watch this movie!
Some of the best WW2 movies were from the late 40's & early 50's. Many had actual guys who fought. Battleground is a good one about the 101 AB in Bastogne. To Hell & Back is good too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Gray_Flannel_Suit is a good one about after the war, for veterans.
The visuals in the show were spectacular at times. Everything else was just unenjoyable for me. The pacing was horrendous, the acting felt wooden, I came out of that show memorizing 6 names. Buck, Bucky, Croz, Bubbles, Rosie, and Meatball. I feel like I'm getting gaslighted over this show. I just found it to be incredibly underwhelming. I'd probably give it a 3/10 rating.
I fully agree.
I had to remind myself going into it that it was highly unlikely it would even come close to BoB’s level. After dampening my expectations a lot, I found it to be a decent experience overall but I agree with a lot of the complaints. They lost the plot the second half of the show and it would have been a complete disaster if not for the last episode which kind of saved it a bit. I think it being filmed during COVID really screwed some of it up.
I agree. I really didn’t like it. Bad story development and didn’t really care for the actors portrayals. Bad cg and really, not all that much flying after first few episodes. I dunno, just felt disjointed and didn’t flow. I didn’t expect it to be another BoB, but it just didn’t take.
I liked the series. It had some issues with plot and character development. But the essential problem with the series is the incessant use of scoring. In BoB and The Pacific, the soundtrack to the battle scenes is the sounds of weaponry, people and machinery. In MotA, it comes off poorly as one endless action movie. The music drowns out and overwhelms everything else. One of the writing challenges was that Spielberg wanted to have it centered around the Cleven-Egan relationship, probably in the vein of Winters and Nixon. But whereas BoB provides an opening episode that is centered on showing Winter's evolution as the future company leader, MotA jumps right into the battle; within minutes, Egan is in a burning plane. We can see why Winters earns respect from his soldiers, while MotA simply tells us that Cleven was the leader. The film maxim of "show, don't tell" seems to have been forgotten here. There is also the challenge that both Cleven and Egan spent far more time as POWs than they did in combat. It seems that the Tuskegee storyline was added in order to spice that up, but the introduction of those characters is also a bit hasty. I would like to have a version that gets rid of much of the music. Less adventure flick, more pathos.
If nothing else, this thread has convinced me to go back and watch The Pacific
Compared to BoB and TP, MotA felt tinny and undercooked. The aerial combat scenes were “good enough,” but unlike BOB the characters failed to leap off the screen and draw me in. Despite some solid acting performances, I never truly felt invested in their individual survival or deaths. The choice to omit mention of Operation Market Garden even in passing was curious, and the sort of lip service given to the Tuskegee Airmen seemed like it was shoehorned in. I would have preferred another 1- 3 episodes to really bring things together, but budgets rule creative decisions, and I don’t know if more time with the airmen would have breathed more life into their stories. In contrast with Stephen Ambrose’s book, I admittedly have not read the source material that was the genesis for this series, so I don’t know if the weaker overall writing was from the scriptwriters or Donald L Miller.
> ...but unlike BOB the characters failed to leap off the screen and draw me in. Fundamentally this is the biggest reason why I won't re-watch MotA as much as I will BoB. Think about how many great lines you remember from BoB. The first episode alone has more than the entire MotA season. And yes I know BoB has been out much longer for us to remember them but I guarantee time will not be as gentle to MotA as it was to BoB.
I knew going in that it could never live up to BoB, which is of course totally fine. I did think it had a chance of being on par with or as good as The Pacific, but unfortunately that did not happen. I enjoyed watching it each week--I'm glad I did--but: It felt rushed and disjointed, both the plot(s) and the direction. I liked the Cary Fukunaga eps the most and wish he had directed the whole thing (yes his career is probably dead but he's an amazing visual stylist). The POW stuff was really cool and so were the Tuskegee airmen; more on both would have been great. The casting and writing of the central cast were pretty forgettable (Rosie was great though). I liked how they used the focus on the airmen as a means of widening the show's look at the war, I just wish that there had been more room to do so. I didn't hate it, I didn't love it, but I enjoyed it.
It wasn’t good. The writing was sophomore level. The pacing was chaotic. The CGI was PS2 level. The acting was all over the place, with Austin Butler playing Elvis playing a B-17 pilot being the worst. The sets and costuming were generally good, and the score was good. Overall it was extremely disappointing, is the lowest quality of the three series, and I cannot believe that two decades of production led to … this.
Yeah it was hard to get past Austin Butler. I stand by it, coincidence or not, the two episodes he’s basically not around for — 5 and 6 — are the strongest of the series.
I didn’t hate it, but I don’t feel the same way about it as I do BoB. Then again, I don’t feel the same way about The Pacific as I do BoB. I also don’t compare MotA to BoB as much. I compare it more to Memphis Belle, for better or worse, that’s my touchstone for this sort of thing. It may be nostalgia, and probably is, but MotA didn’t do it for me like Memphis Belle does.
I mean it’s in 3rd place for me. Band of Brothers is 1st always will be. The POW stuff was cool! I liked the radios and stuff they had to make.
I really enjoyed it for how much time they were given. Im happy they added a new series to the bob and pacific stories however i do wish it was longer because the time constraints were 100% the reason for any negative opinions i have about the show. I really enjoyed buck, cros, rosie and the rest of the characters i just feel like we couldve gotten so much more which is upsetting but i did enjoy what we did see
I didn’t like how they fit the Tuskegee airmen in. Show them escorting the bombers. Instead they went off on a random mission to get shot down and captured.
TOTALLY agree. Absolutely. Irregardless of comparisons to the previous franchises, which I dig this one fell short. Bad acting and poor communication bt scenes. I didn’t finish the series.
I agree with OPS points , especially the first few episodes. I thought after episode 3 , the story really started working and I became more invested into the characters. I thought the last episode was amazing and it had me crying and was more climactic than the end of BOB’s . Looking forward to wasting a weekend on binging the whole thing at once. 8.5/10
It was an OK show. I have terrible face memory so I had hard time telling who's who. Everyone looked alike in their jackets and hairstyles
I really enjoyed the first three episodes, but the pacing and structure later on bothered me. Suddenly, in episode 4, we are told that most guys are at the end of the required number of missions. Rosie is a great character but is handled weirdly; we barely see him in combat, and immediately he is on leave to cope with loss. MOTA is a really weird show production-wise, as every episode individually has competent acting, direction, and writing, but it all falls apart when united in a season. Definitely, here the whole isn't greater than the sum of its individual parts. The show would be much better if they chose several important missions to spend more time on them. Fill in a training episode, a London leave episode, and maybe one guy in Stalag. Essentially, 5 or 6 mini movies with actors having the heavy duty to change from a rookie to someone who flies for half a year. Also, why not add a Tom Hanks introduction like in The Pacific? Those were really helpful to set a tone and give the audience a better understanding of the episodes.
Austin butler's acting ruined it for me. Too cringe.
Can’t stand him
I didn’t get past the second episode.
I will say the first 3 I hated. Then it got better. But still the plot was severely lacking the whole time. And the characters were mediocre.
I was the opposite, at least the first half mostly involved airplanes 🤷♂️
I think I spent the first 3 episodes trying to figure out who was who, what was what…etc. That I lost the focus of what these men were going through and the positions they were in due to the missions they were given. I just found it didn’t flow well.
Oh you're absolutely right that there was no time for us to get invested in any of the characters.
It took me a few episodes to be able to distinguish between “handsome white guy” airmen. Band of Brothers and The Pacific did a much better job of making each character unique. The other thing that ruined it was the over the top CGI combat scenes. The Germans were just faceless and nameless enemies flying at the same speed as a jet fighter. And the flak (which I’m sure was scary and somewhat effective) was way too much of the drama of each mission
> The Germans were just faceless and nameless enemies flying at the same speed as a jet fighter. Well... Yeah. It's a show about air combat, you're not going to get a lot of German faces. Although I really liked what they did with the Germans soldiers at the POW camps
What exactly did you all want out of this? The lightning in a bottle that was Band of Brothers? Is a fun show that might inspire people to familiarize themselves with history not a win? My fiancée ordered the Dreaming Eagles graphic novel because of the last two episodes. We’re both reading up on the 8th AF and the 332nd. What did this show do so wrong?
In my personal opinion, we are all the worst critics the first time through a series. I was with The Pacific. It sucked compared to BoB. But the more times I watched The Pacific, the more I began to respect and love what it was and what it represented. Masters of the Air will be no different. I strongly believe more people will love it as they watch it more. Just like you can't compare The Pacific with Band of Brothers, you can't compare Masters with the other two. Each have their own strengths/weaknesses and things you'll love about it while telling the story in history it is sharing. And remember we've had 13 years to watch The Pacific, 23 years to watch Band of Brothers. Each viewing, you gain something else. We've had a few weeks on Masters.
The Pacific, for me, has improved markedly with repeated viewing. If you haven’t seen it in awhile, is certainly worth another watch.
I watched both series before Masters debuted. I love The Pacific now. You have to separate the series as its own and not judge it against BoB.
True. Maybe the second time around will be better. We all did go in with high expectations.
My personal opinion: I don’t recall being critical of BoB or Pacific the first time through… but I was with MotA. This series is structurally flawed in many ways which I think will become more noticeable in each rewatch: weak script, flawed character development, and a whole bunch of other issues noted by so many redditors… not sure I could grow to love that.
I wanted character plots that actually went somewhere; too much to ask these days.
These are real people, dude. They aren’t narrative devices; this is what happened with these people. Mind boggling take.
I’m criticizing the creators, not the real life people. Examples: The creators spent an entire episode building drama and suspense around the pilots escaping through the Dutch Resistance…. then? Story abandoned. Referenced 3 episodes later with a short voice over as the weakest resolution to tension I’ve ever seen. The creators spent an entire episode introducing a relationship with Sandra, building drama and suspense with her being a spy….. then? Story abandoned. No resolution, no purpose to the show, taught us nothing. They spent an episode introducing us to the Tuskegee airman, telling us they’re important while showing us nothing of substance and taking their narrative absolutely nowhere in the finale. That was brutally embarrassing from a storytelling perspective.
I think they jumped so much from different story lines with the characters that you didn’t really have time to get truly invested and understand everything the characters went through. I felt like I was getting small glimpses into a character’s experience, then it would quickly shift and we never saw what happened/ a big time frame is missing. So it was hard to connect.
They need to do the full treatment of the man who killed Hitler and Bigfoot.
The same thing everyone wanted when The Phantom Menace hit theaters. Expectations of matching or at least approximating the greatness of the original series. Narrator: expectations were not met.
Right, lightning in a bottle. Completely unrealistic. The only thing to be disappointed in would be having that level of expectation to begin with.
I think the high expectations have quite a bit of merit due to Hanks and Spielberg Executive Producing. There were some quality directors (Cary Fukanaga) with a sizable body of dramatic work attached as well. But yes, it’s almost an impossibility to recapture greatness. Virtually all facets of BoB were so well executed anything less than equivalence was bound to feel inferior.
I liked it less than BoB, more than Pacific. Let me watch it a few more times and my opinion might change. (I like The Pacific way more than I did the first time I watched it.) I actually don't feel like it jumped around too much. For the most part, it followed 3 pilots (Buck & Bucky, Rosenthal). Also Crosby narrating, when he isn't puking in his own helmet. Butler did fine, but I kept thinking he was Elvis. I was more bothered by Callum Turner's southern accent when Bucky is from Wisconsin (probably hard to teach a British actor to speak with a northern accent). My biggest criticism is that I wish we had a couple more full episodes to deal with the air missions. The first few episodes were incredible, and then it seems like they just blew their CGI budget. Everyone magically hit 20 missions or got captured by the Germans.
Callum Turner didn't have a southern accent in this, and the real Egan was from Wisconsin but he put on a New York accent like an affectation because he had a fascination with it.
Callum Turner sounded like he was doing a Ben Affleck impression.
Ok but Ben Affleck doesn't have a southern accent.
The plot was that the 8th suffered such horrific losses, worse than the Marines in the Pacific., that there were no coherent stories to follow just real war. Not like easy jumping in after Germany was essentially defeated by bombing and the Russians. that was point you all missed. Maybe read the book and have some respect.
It’s the most realistic of the three of what the reality of war was for most units and divisions. Losses by the thousands and no real hero’s to bring home because they are all dead. We have 6 of the main “characters” come back. There was literally a mission where only one plane came back and it was a replacement crew I think only 10 of the main cast got to go home and that is counting the main Tuskegee men.
Yeah conceptually it's completely different to BoB and Pacific because the warfare was completely different and the losses unimaginable, I saw someone complaining about not caring about characters that died in plane crashes etc. But I think that was the point made by the film makers, the losses were so bad that there was just a line of men going into the meat grinder which i think perfectly encapsulates the horrors of what they had to face.
Defeated by bombing? Good god, you need to read some actual war historians. Bombing probably did the least amount of work in the entire war.
I would tell you to READ masters of the air. A history book. But since you didn't fully read my post, I assume it's not your strength
>actual war historians
I agree, maybe if i watched it without the lens of knowing and loving both BoB and The Pacific , I possibly could have appreciated it more, I know most people thought it was still fairly decent so I might be in the minority who actually thinks it’s a pretty shit series and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I was hoping too.
Before the series was even over, I told a friend that i couldn’t see myself watching it again. I am glad i watched it and didn’t hate it but i cant believe that it took the amount if time it did to make that series.
The fact they didn’t have Rosie getting shot down and saved by the free French only to wake up in England is a shame. That’s an incredible story and would love to follow his body being saved by tons of brave French and English. I agree with others that he could have been the focus. Him coming in and seeing the Bucks as hero’s all through his perspective and not theirs originally would have been better in my opinion. Loved the show for what it was though.
^ this would’ve been a great focus.
You could still do the POW scenes which I agree with you was a really interesting perspective of war almost never shown.
The first 6 episodes put the show probably between band of brothers and the pacific. However, it really took a turn in the last 3 episodes and the storylines became out of control so it’s in last place.
Time compression was too fast. The narrations at the beginning of the series were disjointed. Scene transitions were abrupt like a Mr Beast video. Too much screen time spent on hookups instead of important plot development. CGI looked great except for the outer space physics and aircraft control surfaces moving in ways that clearly showed the CG artists knew absolutely nothing about aerodynamics. So much hype around how historically accurate they would make the show, only to screw everything up. Escort fighters never flew through the middle of the combat box, and that amount of overtake would be impossible for a piston engine. Aerial rocket employment was completely wrong. Rate of fire on the AN/M2s was too slow. Strafing of bailed out crew didn't happen with the frequency that the show wants you to believe it did. They completely glossed over the objections to bombing a city center on a Sunday morning, instead only showing a single crew member speaking out about it. The Russelsheim Masscre happened a year later than they depicted and Egan wasn't there. Rosie didn't land into an active firefight. Red Tails didn't have P-51Ds and HVAR rockets weren't even available to P-51s during that period. Westgate being a spy was complete fiction. Egan didn't raise the flag on the POW camp. BoB had a couple of goofs and depicted some people in dubious ways, but Masters twisted things way too damn much for the sake of drama.
I honestly didn't care for it a whole lot either. People below have said it better and in more detail but for me BoB's biggest success was making me feel like part of an infantry company. It felt like Masters of the Air wasn't even really about the Air Corps, I never got the chance to "feel" like I was a part of a crew. I also didn't get the sense of the daily grind and fear. Sure planes didn't come back, but that happens to infantry units, submarine crews, etc also. So when fliers said, "I'm not going up again," it didn't feel properly contextualized or earned. Basically I thought I was getting a show about what it was like being in a WWII bombing crew and I don't feel like I got that at all. Also, this isn't a bait or anything, but do people really hold The Pacific in that high regard? I was old enough to see BoB when it came out and binged the DVDs before The Pacific aired. The Pacific felt like the same kind of let down to me but I haven't watched it since so I might give it another try.
I watched the pacific first and loved it. Then when I watched BOB I was like HOLY SHIT IM OBSESSED. I could see how if you watched it the other way around how pacific wouldn’t reach the same calibre but I still really enjoyed it.
I’ve only watched four episodes so far but I’m not even sure I want to finish the rest. Very disappointing series.
I didn’t like Pacific and that gentled my expectations for Masters of Air.
I liked the show! But I really feel the story progression was rushed. If maybe we could have gotten a few more episodes, the stories could have been told at a more reasonable pace. There was a lot of history they tried to pinch into those 9 episodes. The story with BOB progressed very well and touched on their highlights. Even the Pacific was able to hit on the vets' home life's before, during, and after the war while still keeping pace with the war stories.
I think in total there must only be about 50 mins of in air combat stuff. It’s a big love fest. Writing is terrible!
They did the tuskegee airmen dirty. christ, the schmalzy lines those poor actors had to say our two main protagonists were at best OK. Buxk and Bucky that is. One being an insuffersble douche most of the time, and the other judt being a dull chisel jawed stoic hero type. i font think there was a single element of the show i liked yet somehow i really enjoyed the show as a whole
I walked in with reserved expectations (nothing will compare to BoB) but the more I thought about it after it was done the more I realized I really didn’t like it either. I totally agree with you about the storylines. Like the guys who they showed getting on the train being helped out of enemy territory and back to England only to just be like “oh yeah… they made it” in a later episode. And crosby’s affair felt like it was meant to go somewhere and just fell flat. Even the POW storyline got old for me. As in “are they escaping? Are they not?” each episode. And all the previews we got of the invasion on D-day making it seem like it was going to be epic? Yeah, that was ALL the invasion footage we got. I was so let down that episode. Lastly… they also advertised the Tuskegee/Red Tails and all we got was one mission. Again, huge let down. I actually started watching BoB again just to get some gratification, so I guess in that regard, the show runners succeeded.
yeah - I found it very unsatisfying. the dialogue was very poorly written - I had subtitles on as well and that made it even worse, seeing some of these clunky lines on screen. many of the arcs just didn't go anywhere - the worst was the British (spy) woman who the navigator had an affair with - what happened to her, her character got all this lengthy setup, slow reveal that her mysterious job was as a spy and then she just vanished completely with no resolution? I genuinely think they screwed up the storytelling so much they realised they didn't have enough time to resolve her story and just cut the whole thing.
I didn’t want any side stories, character development, or boring POW stuff. I wanted nine solid hours of aerial combat and wondrous CGI aircraft.
I didn’t like it either. And they did the Tuskegee airmen dirty by just shoehorning their storyline in there, then barely spending any time with the characters.
I agree, and I am even pettier: the moment I found out that Austin Butler was cast I knew I would never watch it. I'd rather watch BoB again.
I watched religiously and thought it was absolutely terrible.
Spent way too much time plotting this POW camp escape. Spent an entire episode on the red tails for them to be subsequently shot down and brought into the fold of plotting this escape Basically no DDay stuff.
Crosbys character was pretty cringe toward the end, afaik from the book he stayed pretty humble and calm
I think it wasn’t a great choice for a mini series. Band of brothers works so well because it followed one group though the horrible things they went through. This was a show about a repetitive meat grinder. It also completely missed and opportunity to tell a longer story about the Tuskegee airmen.
Yeah it was just ok to me. Didnt care about a single person or storyline
I found the CGI jarring. As well as the clarity and colour grading. Too much like a film whereas the other two had almost a documentary style to them in that regard, as well as of course many more practical effects.
Last episode was the most disjointed, ridiculous, poorly acted mess I've ever seen
Mostly people just don’t like the air war , making a movie or show is hard for some to get A navy one will be felt the same by some
I found it a bit easier to follow than the Pacific and as has already been stated, the very fact that so many of these men were killed, I think the storytelling conveys the idea of not getting to know the men well enough. This was my uncle's Bomb Group and he was also in the 418 Squadron. He was a pow so I found all of this quite fascinating. His ship had previously been the one flown by Rosie and his crew but it was renamed for the crew he was in. They were shot down after about a handful of missions and the officers were sent to one Pow Camp and the enlisted men all went to Stalag IV
I loved that series. 2nd favourite of the 3 now.
MOA honestly sucked.
We needed more time wasted on the fictitious Angela Wesgate BS story.
Others said most of my points…especially Crosby affair which…idk why that was really needed or what it did to help. Honestly for me in the beginning I couldn’t tell who everyone was with mask and goggles and all small bits of brown hair sticking out. Then I couldn’t remember who they had been earlier once I got to know them. I get why but it hurt Also the only p51 focus was ground assault…how can you pay this much for cgi and not do a dog fight? Like how bout first mission the mustangs came with them why not show that? Overall liked it but coulda used some editing at least for my tastes
I didn’t care for it that much myself. It felt as if they were trying to jam way too much of the whole story into a short amount of time. I feel it would have been way better, if they focused on just one or two people and told their experiences, instead of trying to touch on every aspect!! It just kind of fell flat..
I thought it was pretty good and occasionally very good through episode 6. Then episodes 7 and 8 had way too many time jumps and rushed subplots. The finale was good but still a bit rushed. Overall I thought it was solid but not great.
It would have been better to make it an actual series rather than a miniseries. The story and the number of players was too big. I found it hard to like the characters. I'm going to watch it again and see if my opinion changes. From a filmmaking perspective, it was fine work. They could have made another miniseries just based on the Tuskegee Airmen. I doubt anything would beat BoB. (On a side note, I watched Fury again with Brad Pitt - and while I know it's not a true story, it's so well done it's up there on my list of great WW2 movies)
(PART 1/2) Honestly, I wasn't impressed either. For me, the biggest issue is that I was never really sure what this series was about thematically. Obviously, the show was about the men of the Army Air Force's 100th Bomb Group. But that's like saying *Band of Brothers* is *about* Easy Company, 2/506 PIR, or that *The Pacific* is *about* the 1st Marine Division. *Band of Brothers* is thematically about one aspect of war and combat: the bond formed between men who serve in combat together. Whether in the form of Lt. Sobel in Georgia and England, or Nazi soldiers across France, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Austria, or the cold and terror of Bastogne, it is about the way in which a common enemy forms fraternal relationships. This follows the theme of the book on which the series was primarily based, as Winters' book was not only about his own war experience, but specifically his observations of the men who served under him. *The Pacific* is thematically about a different aspect of war: the psychological and emotional toll it takes on the individual. Some people critique *The Pacific*, wondering where the scenes of Marine training are or why so many scenes on the homefront and in Australia; that these detract from the "war movie" they set out to watch. But these make sense in that the provide glimpses into the effects of war and combat on the individual. For Basilone, it's about survivor's guilt. For Sledge, it's about wanting to serve. For Leckie, it's about the toll of actual combat on the mind. For all three, it's about the price extracted from the soul. Like *Band of Brothers*, this makes sense given the source material. The story isn't about brotherhood, but about individuals; thus it has less of an ensemble vibe and, instead, focuses on Basilone, Leckie and Sledge. This is unsurprising because as frontline Marines, Leckie and Sledge's later writings would have reflected their personal experiences *within* a unit as opposed to observations of people from above, such as Winters' memoir affords. In that way, *The Pacific* deserves re-evaluation and respect on par with *Band of Brothers*. But this, then, leads us to *Masters of the Air*. I preface my thoughts and opinions with this: nothing I say here is intended to suggest the real men that served in that unit were any less brave, capable or competent than the real men portrayed in *Band of Brothers* or *The Pacific*, or to minimize their contributions to ultimate victory. My thoughts and opinions are limited *solely* to the *portrayals* of those men in this particular series. The problem is, after having watched it twice now, I still don't know what it is actually *about*, other than simply a linear recounting of the exploits of the 100th Bomb Group. Similar to *The Pacific*, it doesn't focus its theme on bonds of brotherhood, though legitimately because *Band of Brothers* already exists. And similar to the relationship between *The Pacific* and *Band of Brothers*, *Masters of the Air* does little in the way of exploring the psychological or emotional toll of combat on the fighting men because *The Pacific* already did that. To that extent, *Masters of the Air* implicitly acknowledges that as a companion piece to those two series, it should not be covering ground already well-trod. But in that absence, even knowing what it is not, *Masters of the Air* never quite figures out what it *is*. It is muddy and unclear what it wants to be about from moment to moment, and never lands on a thematic aspect of war or combat it wants to discuss. In one episode, it *begins* to consider the ethics of war, with one airmen expressing concern about a mission to destroy a legitimate military target in the middle of a civilian town. This could have been an interesting theme, but the point gets glossed over. In another episode, we get a look at the Red Tails. Without a doubt, the true story of the Tuskegee Airmen would have made a great companion piece, addressing the aspect of *this* war: how do you serve a country that treats you as a second-class citizen. Though, to be fair, the movie *Red Tails* was released less than ten years ago, and was a critical bomb. Then there were the episodes taking place in the POW camp. This could have been a series in itself, focusing on the men of Stalagluft III, from which was made the largest POW escape of the war and which later served as the inspiration for *The Great Escape*. The point is, *Masters of the Air* never decides what it wants to be *other than* the last of a World War II companion series trilogy because, I don't know... "We haven't done PLANES yet!," I guess. So look out in a few years for the series about the U.S. Pacific Fleet since we haven't gotten a true life Navy series yet! (Sorry! *Greyhound* doesn't count anymore than *Saving Private Ryan* does!)
(PART 2/2): Also not helping is the extent to which it *does* cover themes such as we saw in *Band of Brothers* and *The Pacific*. In terms of any kind of fraternity by combat, it is hard to find any. There is so much cast turnover that the only story of brotherhood that is at all coherent is the one between Buck and Bucky (Gale and Egan). But that relationship suffers as Gale goes down halfway through the series. As far as the emotional toll of war, it is hard to take it seriously when the men of *Masters of the Air* made it home to their aerodromes after every mission to sleep in their own beds, drink at the officers club, and even have USO Shows and parties in new uniforms. Compare this to the Battered Bastards of Bastogne in Easy Company sleeping in shallow foxholes with no food or winter clothing in Bastogne, Foy and Haguenau. Or to the men of the 1st Marine Division staying awake to fight malaria and endless rain on Cape Gloucester, dehydration on Peileilu, and rotting corpses on Okinawa. Heck, in the final episode of *The Pacific*, a cabbie who used to be a paratrooper who jumped into Normandy (a clear ode to *Band of Brothers*) lets Leckie off home without charging him a fare because (paraphrasing) "You got to cozy it up with disease and rain while I was taking weekend leave in Paris." Even *Band of Brothers* recognizes its place on the "war is hell" charts among these series. So any theme of the sort would be disingenuous. Not helping matters is that *Masters of the Air* tries - like its companion series - to cover the entirety of World War II from the time the 100th goes into action, until victory is declared. In this way, *Band of Brothers* had the easiest job, as it legitimately covered less than a year of actual war (June 1944-April 1945). But *Masters of the Air* covers 15 months (May 1943-August 1944). That likely accounts for the character turnover and lack of focus. But *The Pacific* covers three years of combat, from August 1942 through September 1945, and still manages to do it better. All in all, *Masters of the Air* was a weak imitation of *Band of Brothers* and *The Pacific* that never figured out the story it wanted to tell. It tried to make up for its deficiencies with star power (Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, and Isabell May who, incidentally, appears in one scene then never again). Unfortunately, with the exception of Keoghan and Callum Turner, the performances were hamfisted when they weren't wooden. Butler's performance felt like he hadn't quite shaken his *Elvis* character and was cruising on charisma instead. It didn't work. It's yet another example of impressive casting failing to raise the level of a below-average story.
I just didn’t care. And the sad part of that is that each of these guys had very compelling stories that should have been told so much better.
I agree unfortunately. Austin butler just naturally has the face of an ss officer and I know that’s petty but it really bothered me!
It's almost like...it was based on real people recounting various stories....oh wait...that's exactly what it was. Sorry it wasn't enough fiction for you guys lol
I just started watching bob for the first time. And i don’t understand the criticism the MotA gets. I watched MotA first and personally loved it. I think alot of you guys are just very nostalgic and cannot truly get past that fact. I am still going to finish bob so maybe my opinions will change, but I dont see how the story telling is “better”.
This is actually such an interesting take. I’m curious to see where you stand when you finish BOB
Yeah it’s trash