Archive
MASTERS OF THE AIR – Blake Neely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Masters of the Air is the latest TV mini-series from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks looking at the American military experience in World War II. It serves as a companion piece its predecessors Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), as well as the 2020 movie Greyhound, and is based on the 2007 book of the same name by Donald L. Miller, which follows the actions of the 100th Bomb Group, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber unit in the Eighth Air Force in eastern England during World War II. Led by Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven and John ‘Bucky’ Egan, the group embarks on a series of dangerous missions to bomb targets inside German-occupied Europe. The series stars Austin Butler and Callum Turner as Buck and Bucky, with support from Anthony Boyle, Nikolai Kinski, and Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan. Read more…
GREYHOUND – Blake Neely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Greyhound is a World War II action thriller directed by Aaron Schneider, and written by Tom Hanks, who adapted the novel The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester, the creator of the great fictional British naval hero Captain Horatio Hornblower. Hanks himself plays Ernest Krause, a commander in the United States Navy, who is charged with escorting and protecting a multi-national fleet of ships across the Atlantic, while it is under attack from Nazi German U-Boats. The film co-stars Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, and Elisabeth Shue, and is a classic claustrophobic cat-and-mouse naval thriller in the tradition of Das Boot, Run Silent Run Deep, and Sink the Bismarck, the latter of which was also based on a Forester novel. The film was initially scheduled to be released in cinemas in June 2020 but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and eventually premiered straight-to-streaming on the Apple TV+ platform. Read more…
THE PACIFIC – Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli and Blake Neely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When the TV mini-series Band of Brothers first aired in 2001 it was hailed as a great piece of television art; a thoughtful, emotional, well-produced, well-acted and well-directed look at the lives – and deaths – of the men who served in the US military in Europe during World War 2. Almost a decade later, the same group of talented individuals have come together again to make The Pacific, which tells the simultaneous story of the men and women who fought in the Pacific theater against the Japanese at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and all across the Pacific Ocean. The series stars Joseph Mazzello, Jon Seda, William Sadler and James Badge Dale, and began airing on HBO in the United States on March 14, 2010.
The late, great Michael Kamen wrote one of the finest scores of his career for the original Band of Brothers series. For The Pacific, the producers turned to the composing trifecta of Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli and Blake Neely to write almost nine hours Read more…
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