THE COMING DISAPPOINTMENT OF "MASTERS OF THE AIR"

Normally, I don't do detail accuracy criticism about anything coming out of Okeefenokee West, particularly about war movies and most definitely particularly in the past 25 years as the place has been taken over by the intergalactic widgetmakers.

But Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks aren't supposed to be one of "those guys." When they did "Band of Brothers," they set the Gold Standard with the 10 best war movies ever made. They set their own standard: “We’ll do it right.”

Using that standard, they have been on a downhill run ever since with this series, and I am sorry to tell you it will be more of the same this time around. At a price of $3 million an episode, one would think they might be able to include a historian who knew the subject in the budget.

The follow-up - "the Pacific" - managed to prove you cannot pour Cabernet into a Chardonnay bottle and get the same result.

Just speaking as a lowly screenwriter who has done some adaptations, if you read a book and come to an interesting event and the author writes that it was the most memorable event of their life, that it changed them forever, it's probably a good idea to do that scene very close to as written - you certainly do not turn it into a throwaway moment. (Which they did, more than once.)

I read both of the books they adapted - Robert Leckie’s memoir of Guadalcanal, “A Helmet for my Pillow” and Eugene Sledge’s memoir of the Central Pacific, “With The Old Breed”- more than once over the years. Had they done one or the other, and let themselves be guided by what the author said, they could have created a thoroughly worthy successor to “Band of Brothers.” But trying to tell one story about two guys, neither of whom ever knew the other one existed, is a recipe for disaster. In the end I was so disappointed I didn't watch the last four episodes. Only in Hollywood would it be the case that the exact same people who made all the right decisions in Band of Brothers were the ones who made all the wrong decisions in the second series.

And it doesn't look like I will be watching any of the 10 episodes of "Masters of the Air," just based on the glaring mistakes that stand out like flashing neon in the 2 minute 30 second trailer (where they usually put what they think is The Good Stuff to attract the viewer).

One would think that after nine years (that I know of) in development and production, these kinds of obvious mistakes would have been caught and fixed. The fact they weren't points to the very high likelihood of other even more egregious mistakes in the body of the work.

The most obvious is having the Tuskeegee Airmen - the “Red Tails” - in the story at all. This is supposed to be the story of the 100th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, known as “The Bloody Hundredth” for the actions they took part in during the campaign.

I have written about the Eighth Air Force, and I am currently working on a book about the Fifteenth Air Force. Let me assure you, there was never a moment - not one! - where any Eighth Air Force bomb group - let alone the Bloody Hundredth! - was in the same airspace with any Fifteenth Air Force fighter group. They fought separate wars.

If it wasn’t that Hanks and Spielberg have set themselves such a high bar, I wouldn’t even write a sentence about the sight of Red Tails P-51s engaging in air combat with a full load of rockets underwing; the only P-51 units that carried rockets in the whole damn war were the groups that flew out of Iwo Jima against Japan, at the end of the war.

The unfortunate conclusion one has to draw from this is that Apple’s DEI Division told Hanks and Spielbrg they had to be more “inclusive” than the two previous series were, for which they were criticized by the Ahistorians of Political Correctness when they came out (though they were both historically accurate in their portrayal of who fought in those units). Had Spielberg and Hanks believed in their choice of base material, they could have dealt with the racial situation in England, which the book “Masters of the Air” was the first mainstream history to delve into and present in detail. Since those events came to a “good” conclusion, a chance to educate people with a compelling story was lost and once again the much-mythologized Red Tails get “the treatment” again.

All of the flying scenes are done with CGI, which is also distracting, since World War II fighters don't fly like X-wing fighters in a Star Wars movie. The Digital Dopes really screwed the pooch on this.

The trailer also appears to hint that there are a few more historical events included in which the 100th Bomb Group never took part in. This is just sloppy.

And to top it off, the story of Robert Rosenthal, one of the truly great American heroes of the war, the New York lawyer who fought to join the air force at age 35, flew two tours with the Bloody Hundredth, ending as the Deputy Group Commander, who then stayed in Europe and put his legal experience to work as Chief American Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, is going to suffer in this.

I've had a bad feeling about this project for the past several years as I heard who had been put in charge - who was writing the scrips and who would be directing. I'll just say I know them by reputation, and none of them has any reputation for familiarity with the military of any era. This is unsurprising - outside of some actors and a couple wannabe writers I've met in the past few years - there is nobody I know of outside of me and Jim Carabatsos and Oliver Stone with any military experience in the working ranks of Hollywood - and we aren't doing anything there now. "Writers write what they know," and that matters. Hollywood is now the playground of the Ivy League Trust Fund Babies who could live on daddy’s money long enough to “break in,” and as we all know, the Ivy League upper class doesn’t go to war nowadays.

I'm sure the dopes who post idiot remarks about my books not having some fact that never happened that they're sure really happened, will really like this show. But the funny thing is, the audience knows when something is fake, even if they don’t know what specifically is false. “The Pacific” got about one third the eyeballs “Band of Brothers” did, and I am sure nobody was quitting the show because they had done an analysis of how the story was poorly told.

I know it’s not just me - everyone I know who knows the real facts agrees with this analysis. We might not be a big enough crowd to fill the old Nuart Theater here for one screening, but the fact this show is bullshit is going to become apparent even to the Generation Zzzzz’s who can’t tell the difference between the Revolution and the Second World War.

I really, really, really wanted to be wowed by this, but like most things in Hollywood... it’s just another fine mess.

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