Flyboys (Widescreen Edition)
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Actor: James Franco, Mac McDonald, Philip Winchester, Scott Hazell, Todd BoyceBrand: FRANCO,JAMES
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), DTS 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Dubbed), DTS 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 139 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-01-30
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of Flyboys (Widescreen Edition)
DVD Review: Can you spot the real actors in this movie?
Summary: 3 Stars
The real actors?
Well, there's poor James Franco, a fine young actor, who must be cursing his bad luck in getting to play the leading man only in movies plagued by rotten screenplays and supporting casts, and also in losing the leading man role (and then having to play second fiddle) to some wimp in that blockbuster series of all time, Spider-man...
And then there's Jean Reno, Hollywood's favorite token Frenchman (even though he was born in Morocco to Spanish parents, as Juan Moreno), once again playing the earnest, understanding wise man with the funny French accent........ gosh, if only all French people could be just like him! ......especially those nasty waiters and shopkeepers in Paris, and those anti-American French politicians......
This movie had so many clichéd scenes in it that I began to realize that the filmmakers must have thought that they could get away with it because the younger movie-going generation wouldn't recognize these as clichés, since most are from an older generation of movies. It must save money to just recycle the old classic scenes, instead of hiring better, more original screenwriters.
There's the obligatory sendoff at the train station with the girlfriend running alongside the train (I winced during this scene, half expecting the girl to run splat into a signpost.........ooops, wrong movie, that was from one of the "Hot Shots" series); the obligatory first fight at the bar amongst the airmen; the obligatory hero's death with kamikaze swan dive into the mission target; the obligatory hero saves girl - hero loses girl plot; the obligatory devout Christian, who might as well have also been carrying a sign saying "I'LL BE DEAD MEAT SOON" along with his Bible.
So what about the non-actors?
Chief among them has to be David Ellison, son of billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle Software. Daddy helped finance a good chunk of the $60 million budget of this movie which meant that, despite a complete lack of any acting ability, on a scale similar to the fiasco that was Jake Lloyd (little Anakin - Stars Wars, Phantom Menace), and despite an intensely annoying screen presence equivalent to that of Jar Jar Binks from that same movie, David Ellison gets huge amounts of screen time, including a constant series of brief cutaway shots focused on him, designed to subliminally remind the viewer that he's in this movie........OOOOOFFTA........can you spell N-A-R-C-I-S-S-I-S-T ?
Another near non-actor, Jennifer Decker - the girl who plays James Franco's love interest Lucienne. OK, she's sort of cute, but who told her that the way to play a French girl who doesn't speak English is to act like a deaf-mute? How the heck did SHE get this role? We used to come to the answer to that question quite easily, but unfortunately, it is no longer politically correct to say such things in public.
Historically, a number of things are not quite right. The Nieuport 17s that the airmen are supposedly flying had rotary engines, not the radial engines depicted. NONE of the fighters of WWI had radial engines in fact, since air cooling technology had not developed fully to allow for fixed cylinder heads (in the rotary engines, the cylinder heads of the engine spun around together with the propeller, thus providing superior air cooling). In any case, the Lafayette Escadrille would quickly lose the Nieuport 17s and mostly fly SPADs (which had inline engines) for much of the war.
And those bullet holes! Come on! The planes were made of fabric and wood, and had absolutely NO ARMOR! If bullets hit all around the cockpit, the pilot is DEAD! How the heck could James Franco's plane be so riddled with bullets in that last dogfight, and he only gets hit ONCE!?
That's just my two bits on the historical inaccuracies - there are a great many in this movie which have been pointed out by other reviewers already.
However, in spite of all its flaws, this was a moderately entertaining movie. I watched it as a $2 rental, on my 23" widescreen computer monitor, so that I could surf the Internet whenever the movie got too inane. It's the only way to watch this movie, as far as I'm concerned. Whenever Jar Jar..., I mean, David Ellison,... appeared onscreen, I would Google something about him or his billionaire father - these multi-tasking distractions helped to get me through those scenes, and reminded me also that money has its privileges.
I give the movie one star for James Franco's earnest performance, one star for the CGI flying sequences, and one star for trying to tell some of the history of WWI, even if the details got mangled
Description of Flyboys (Widescreen Edition)
Inspired by true events, tells the story of the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American men who volunteered to fight for the French before the U.S. entered World War I and became the country's first fighter pilots.Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 18-SEP-2007
Media Type: DVD
World War I aviation action gets an impressive digital upgrade in Flyboys, a welcome addition to the "dogfight" sub-genre that includes such previous war-in-the-air films like Hell's Angels, Wings, and The Blue Max. While those earlier films had the advantage of real and genuinely dangerous flight scenes (resulting, in some cases, in fatal accidents during production), Flyboys takes full (and safe) advantage of the digital revolution, with intensely photo-realistic recreations of WWI aircraft, authentic period structures, and CGI environments requiring a total of 850 digital effects shots, resulting in an abundance of amazing images, many of them virtually indistinguishable from reality. Unfortunately, the film's technical achievement is more impressive than its screenplay, which conventionally and predictably tells the fact-based story, set in France in 1916, of the daring young pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, a pioneering French air-combat unit that welcomed American enlistees prior to the United States' entry into the war.
There's a familiar cliché to match every thrilling scene of aerial combat, but director Tony Bill manages to keep it all interesting, from the romance between a young American maverick (James Franco) and a pretty French girl (newcomer Jennifer Decker) to the exciting action in the air, which includes a stock variety of heroes (many of them composites of real-life WWI pilots) and an intimidating villain known only as "The Black Falcon," whose Fokker Dr-1 triplane (one of many in the film) recalls the exploits of German "ace of aces" Manfred von Richtofen, the dreaded "Red Baron" of legend. With impeccable production values that will impress even the most nit-picking aviation buffs, Flyboys (like Superman Returns and Apocalypto, also released in 2006) was also one of the first feature films to be shot with Panavision's state-of-the-art Genesis digital cameras, resulting in beautiful images that meet or exceed the visual nuance of film. Flyboys also benefits from painstaking attention to physical detail, making it easier to forgive its shortcomings as a generic and formulaic slice of romanticized history. So while some viewers may have wished for a more realistic and grown-up depiction of the Lafayette Escadrille, it's safe to say that Flyboys will be thrilling its target audience for many years to come. --Jeff Shannon
Extras from Flyboys
 Director Tony Bill on Filming Dogfight Sequences |  ...On throwing away the script for pilot training |  ...On the real-life stunt pilot who stars in the film |
Beyond Flyboys
 More "War in the Sky" Films |  SPA124 Lafayette Escadrille: American Volunteer Airmen in World War 1 |  More "Military and War" Films |
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