Product: Flyboys [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 2.0
Not bad if you ignore the facts.
I confess I was entertained by the movie -in those moments when I wasn't screaming at the TV. Some of the historical inaccuracies were so glaring that even for a work of fiction it was hard to swallow. At the beginning the movie states that 9 million would eventually die in WWI - soliders perhaps. That total is nowhere complete if you add in the civillian dead. A good number of which would have come from the area in which the characters were fighting. The Verdun front was a wasteland for miles - towns were obliterated from the shelling - the area around the fronts were ruined for not years but decades. No cheery farmhouse with well-fed children, no trees or plowed fields visible from the air, nothing but death and destruction for miles and miles. Trench warfare was not confined to a thin sliver. Though the front itself moved only yards the shelling and death reigned over an extended area. There are villages in the area that never returned and if you drive over the battlefield even now 90 years later as I did, you can still see the craters and hills caused by the shelling. The aviators were above the day to day merciless killing field but they were not untouched by it. My biggest problem with the film was the complete santization of WWI. The northern part of France and southern Belgium were devasted far more thoroughly than even Germany in WWII. It was truely hell on earth. Other reviewers have addresed the inaccuracies in the planes used - do not get me started on the mechanized land transportation. Tanks were only beginning to be developed and would not have been used as shown - also correct me if I am wrong but the Germans had already crossed the Meuse River much earlier in the War. At this point in time they would have been drive back - probably by Black Jack Pershing. The producers could have spent a bit more money on some historical research and less on their computer graphics. They did not get their money's worth there either. As it was, I could never tell who was who during the arial combat sequences. I would have sworn one fellow was dead only to have him reappear later in the movie. I did enjoy the camaraderie and would have like to see more of the unit as a whole.