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Masters of the Air has become one of the most viewed new shows on Apple TV+ following its premiere on January 26. The new World War II miniseries from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks follows the 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb Group as they wreak havoc in the skies over Hitler's Germany despite suffering extraordinary casualties. The 100th was nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth” due to the heavy losses they suffered at the hands of anti-aircraft guns and Luftwaffe fighters.
If you are enjoying Masters of the Air, below are three movies and two miniseries that might be worth checking out.
5 things to watch after Masters of the Air
We kick things off with a couple of high-profile movies from recent years.
Midway
If you are a fan of World War II aerial combat, the 2019 version of Midway is a great movie for you to watch. This movie re-creates the naval battle that turned the tide of the Second World War in the Pacific. The aerial scenes are stunning, particularly the scenes that show the U.S. Navy’s dive bombers screaming down toward their targets from 20,000 feet. The scenes are harrowing, and viewers will feel like they are in the cockpit of the dive bombers themselves. Midway does an excellent job of bringing to life the nightmare these pilots experienced while carrying out an attack that changed the course of history.
CGI is used effectively in the filming of this movie, and the scenes of the bombing runs are vivid. They do an excellent job of capturing the terrifying view the pilots must have faced as they angled their planes directly towards the ocean surface and dove through the unending flak explosions while fending off enemy Zero fighter planes.
Top Gun: Maverick
If after watching Masters of the Air you want to see what modern aerial combat is like, Top Gun: Maverick should jump to the top of your must-watch list. The 2022 sequel to the 1986 classic features exhilarating shots of air-to-air combat. Maverick was filmed in cooperation with the United States Navy and forgoes CGI in favor of real-world footage filmed from the cockpit of F-18 and F-14 fighter jets.
Maverick is not only one of the best movies of the 2020s or one of the best action movies of the 21st century, but it is also one of the best aerial combat movies that has ever been made. Maverick was a blockbuster, but not just because of Tom Cruise starring in it. The excellent storyline and the hype of a long-awaited sequel more than three decades after a classic original. The incredible dogfight sequences between powerful fighter jets helped make Top Gun: Maverick a summer blockbuster and will keep viewers rewatching this masterpiece for years to come.
Tom Cruise is a notorious perfectionist, and viewers are the beneficiaries of Cruise's fanatical commitment to filming the most exhilarating aerial combat sequences that have ever been filmed. Top Gun: Maverick seems custom-designed for the big screen, and is widely credited with reviving the movie theater business in the post-COVID-19 era.
The Pacific
The Pacific is the 2010 miniseries that serves as the first companion to Band of Brothers. This series, which was also brought to life by both Spielberg and Hanks, follows the lives of a select few Marines as they fight their way across the Pacific Ocean toward the Japanese home islands.
The Pacific is known for its brutality and realism. It doesn’t shy away from the hell-on-earth nature of the war in the Pacific and features plenty of gruesome scenes depicting what the war was like. The Pacific also sheds light on the moral ambiguity with which World War II in the Pacific was fought. It doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that the Marines witnessed, but it also depicts with brutal realism the impact that combat had on the Marines and the lack of humanity with which the island campaign was fought.
Band of Brothers
If you are a fan of Masters of the Air, in addition to the Pacific, you must also check out Band of Brothers. This renowned miniseries was the first one in the trilogy and follows Easy Company as they parachute into France and fight to rid Europe of Nazism. The quality of this series is striking given that it was filmed back in 2001. Band of Brothers may not have had access to the technological advances that modern films have, but it still remains one of the seminal viewing experiences of World War II.
Greyhound
If a movie about one of the lesser-known battles of World War II interests you, watch Greyhound. Tom Hanks stars in this movie as an inexperienced captain tasked with safely escorting a convoy of merchant ships through the North Atlantic while protecting them from prowling packs of German U-boats. Greyhound expertly captures the fear the Nazi U-boat fleet struck into the souls of the merchant sailors and their escorts, and the incredible courage of the sailors that guided the convoys through submarine-invested waters to deliver desperately needed supplies to England.
