Review: Masters of the Air, "Part Eight"

Where were you when Saving Private Ryan first came out? I noted that 1998 film and its long legacy when I first started reviewing Masters of the Air, and I hope you’ll forgive me for invoking the Spielberg epic again. It’s not just the fact that the film led to series such as this one, but that its opening half-hour depicting the D-Day invasion of Normandy by the Allied Forces is one of the most powerful and influential pieces of filmmaking of my lifetime. Shaky-cam existed before Saving Private Ryan, but its jittery, verite presence in that film has essentially recreated a standard for action filmmaking.

The visual aesthetic aside, the opening of Saving Private Ryan took a familiar moment in modern world history and lay bare the dark reality of how violent and intense D-Day was. When I was growing up, D-Day was an event to be celebrated and one that—at least in the public schools of Western New York—was not taught with a great a…