Product: Flyboys [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 3.0
Historically accurate?
Flyboys is a decent adventure film, but with apologies to reviewer Monty Rainey, it can hardly be praised for its historical accuracy. The computer-generated planes zip around more like jet fighters than WW1 planes, making snap-rolls & vertical climbs rather than Immelman turns & the slower, more gradual maneuvers the real planes were capable of. The Nieuports the Escadrille fly were obsolete & replaced by Spads by late 1916/early 1917 (when the movie takes place--they mention the USA entering the war which was April, 1917), and the Fokker Triplane didn't enter service until the winter of 1917 & never in great numbers (very few were red by the way). These quibbles aside, what really destroys the believabilty of the movie is when one of the Flyboys gets shot down & crashes in no-man's land (at a point where the German & French lines seem to be about 50 yards apart when a half mile is about the closest they ever actually got). Though he's in the cockpit when it crashes, the pilot somehow gets his hand trapped between the ground & the upper wing (which miraculously didn't collapse when the plane flipped upside down). And he can't get it out! His friend has to land (apparently also in no-man's land), run THRU no-man's land perpendicular to all the Germans shooting at him, & help his friend get his hand out. (I won't spoil it by saying how.) WW1 fighters weighed roughly 1000 lbs, with the engine & guns comprising over half the total weight. The top wing his hand was trapped under would have weighed about 100 lbs total. If your hand was trapped under one side, you'd simply lift it off with your free hand. Also the trailing edge of the Nieuport was made up of a pine-wood stringer which was one inch square. He could have cut your way thru it with a penknife. OR, since his hand was trapped between the wing & the GROUND, he could have simply dug the earth away underneath it.Other blatant inaccuracies: the Germans invade with tanks of British design a year before the tank was invented; they've made a massive breakthrough within a few miles of the airfield & the pilots (& the hero's French girlfriend living in the war zone) are completely unaware of it; the hero takes off at night, lands (where? in a field, in the dark?) by his girl friend's house, & none of the thousands of German soldiers in the area hear the plane. . .For all that, it's not a bad action movie, but as far as being realistic? They should have just made the movie about the real Escadrille pilots. Raoul Lufbery's true exploits would have been much more exciting. (To anyone interested in the true story of the Escadrille, I heartily recommend Jeff Shaara's novel about WW1, TO THE LAST MAN. And for a movie that gets to the heart of what flying in WW1 was really like, try THE DAWN PATROL with Errol Flynn (coming out in March on dvd).