airborne_trooper

The set pieces and cinematography are amazing. However....

Apple still hasn't learned that we live in a binge over the weekend, show me now age. This isn't 1997. Stop releasing new material week by week, expecting to hold the collective audience's interest. Back then that was the norm and people dealt with it. Now? If you're gonna do that; you better come up with something so tantalizing and gripping that the audience will come back from more.

This show already started out on an uphill climb being compared to BoB and The Pacific. But then to have two 1 hour long episodes that explained virtually nothing and developed no one, makes it really difficult to wait week after week to have things flesh out.

So far it's just utterly disjointed. You have no care for what happens to anyone because you haven't a clue who anyone is. You don't know what they're fighting for or why. Every song, phrase and gesture is a total trope from the 40s and there's just nothing original or dynamic here.

BoB took the time to explain who each character was why you should love them why you should hate them, here's where we're fighting and why.

The Pacific spent a little less time explaining characters but still took the time to explain the where and why we're fighting and dare I say did a better job than BoB of not romanticizing war.

Masters of the Air does neither. The plot meanders, the characters are just there, and it's literally just going from scene to scene showing war stuff.

We obviously can't hold total judgment until the end. But so far this is totally underwhelming and Apple ain't doing itself any favors holding this show hostage with an antiquated release method.

First I'll say that this was a fantastic series and an important story that needed to be told. The set pieces were top notch, as with the cinematography, actors/actresses and particularly the wardrobe. I noticed they re-created exactly what Bradley was wearing the day she viewed her son's body.

Now with that, I have one major gripe with this series. Bradley was courageous enough to allow the world to see what those men did. It was shocking to the senses I'm sure. I feel that this series was far too cautious with it. I get trying to toe the line of not being exploitive and gory. But people NEED to see this. And not in two second bursts. Bradley wanted people to see what those men did and glazing over it isn't going to change what happened.

Same goes for the actual assault. They skipped right over it. Why?

Again, good series, but sometimes you gotta just show the whole truth, not just the outcome.

Let's start with the good. Podcast and Phoebe are fantastic actors and I really enjoyed their characters. Carrie Moon and Paul Rudd hold up the rear as good secondary characters. The Easter eggs throughout were fun to keep an eye out for too.

Now for the bad. First and foremost, Ghostbusters just doesn't feel right outside of New York City. Watching Ecto-1 tear down a cornfield isn't quite the same as seeing it careen through the streets of Manhattan. Next, I could be wrong but Ghostbusters 2 does not seem to be apart of this movie's timeline. If it is, they went the entire runtime without making one single reference to it. In turn, this movie leaned on GB1's existence so hard that it couldn't flesh out its own story. Not just bringing back old villains, but at some points having them say and do the exact same things they did in the original! At one point they literally just did a certain scene all over again. If you gave GB2 grief for following the same formula as the original then you likely should haaaate this movie because it didn't even just re-do the same formula, it quite literally copy and pasted most of the key elements including the score.

I wasn't too keen on the whole "Stranger Things meets Goonies meets Ghostbusters" theme and my skepticism proved correct after seeing this. Ghostbusters was an adult subject that HAD to be played by adults in order for it to work. Having kids be GBs creates too many unnecessary problems that adults don't have to deal with. Which is why this movie would work better as a series. You have more time and room to work around obstacles that kids would face rather than forcing them through a problem to fit into movie runtime.

Lastly, Ghostbusters 1 and 2 had a tone. While they're largely considered comedies, most true fans definitely picked up on Dan Aykroyd's very real preoccupation with the supernatural. And his attention to detail with regard to telling a story about fighting ghosts, showed through the slapstick humor a-la Venkman's constant one liners. This movie absolutely fails at that. It's not dark, it's not very serious and it's most definitely built with attracting kids in mind. Plus aside from all the fan service "gimmies", this movie has next to no plot at all. They revisit the whole Gozer plot somehow managing to not really explain anything about its inception. The jail scene in GB1 explained more than what was said in this entire movie.

All in all it was a valiant effort on Jason Reitman's part to try and bring this back but too much time has gone by. And the theme and tone he ended up with in this movie just doesn't fit the original Ghostbusters vibe. Such a wasted opportunity. But I commend him for trying to do the fans a service after that train wreck in 2016. That said, as a true Ghostbusters fan who's been diehard my entire life, I could quite literally never watch this movie again and not even care.