Product: Flyboys [Blu-ray] (2006)
Rating: 4.0
A lot better than watching jets
Since Top Gun, war movies about aerial warfare have always taken second seat to war movies about land battles, in terms of award nominations and box office takes. This movie shares this fate. It came out in 2006 and was probably the least hyped and least successful war movie of 2006, lagging far behind Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Annapolis, and others in the same genre. But don't let this fool you, this was a good movie, fun to watch and engaging the entire way. The movie begins by showing how the various Americans joined the war before their own country. The movie then progresses to show their training, and troubles both in and out of the cockpit. Finally comes the dogfights, of which there are several. One dogfight occurs around a zeppelin, another occurs over a trench battlefield, and another occurs over fields and forests. The dogfights themselves were very realistic, and the only miss of detail is that all the pilots landed looking just as good as when they took of, even though they sat in open air cockpits. It seems hair gel was standard treatment for WWI pilots.For a war movie, it has all the generic subplots; the romance between a local girl and the group's brooding conscious, the doomed hero, the silent villian, the spoiled rich kid who does good, and the over eager chap who losses his nerve, only to gain it back at the end. No surprises here, though still a good story.