I have nothing against a good old-fashioned flying-aces war movie, which is what this picture aspires to. I just get a little antsy at movies in which almost every single damn moment is presumed to be dramatic enough to warrant a swelling music cue (I mean, is stepping off a train really that big of a deal?); at movies that bloat their running time by giving almost every single character in an ensemble cast his own issue and his own story arc in which to resolve that issue (disapproving dad, racism, etc.); at movies that are so double-dealingly puritanical that they have their hero meet his new girlfriend in a brothel (which he's in only because he crashed his plane nearby) and then reveal, to his (and presumably our) relief and delight that she's not really a whore herself. If you yourself don't mind that sort of thing, or are better at shrugging it off than I am, you could conceivably get a nice rush from Flyboys, another cinematic retelling of the story of WWI aviation combatters the Lafayette Escadrille, produced by Dean Devlin (one of the Independence Day guys), written by Phil Sears, Blake Evans, and David S. Ward, and directed by Tony Bill (an avid pilot himself).
The picture begins well before the U.S. joins in the war, but its hero, young and vaguely ruffianesque Texan Blaine Rawlings (James Franco), seems to have pretty good reason to get the hell out of not just Dodge (the metaphorical Dodge, lest anyone want to correct me that the real Dodge was in Kansas) but the entire United States, and is inspired by a newsreel to hie to France and learn how to fly one of those crates freelance, as it were. Once there he's placed in a typically motley squadron, shunned as a callow newbie by the more battle-hardened of the bunch, and establishes himself as a potential ace.
The air-battle stuff, a mix of actual from-the-air footage and CGI, is pretty first-rate-reminds me a lot of this video game I was almost getting good at (and then my PlayStation 2 got ripped off) called Secret Weapons Over Normandy, from LucasArts. That probably sounds sarcastic, but it's not-said game placed a premium on from-the-cockpit realism, and for my money got pretty close. (Or, rather, as close as I myself want to get.) But it's interesting that one of the movie's biggest set pieces — involving a zeppelin aiming to drop bombs on Paris — has a strong echo of a blockbuster sequence in Howard Hughes's 1930 film Hell's Angels. Part of what makes these kind of war movies such cinematic comfort food (aside from the moral certainty they strive to convey) is their familiarity. But I wonder if said familiarity is what compels contemporary filmmakers to overstuff the material — Flyboys is a good two hours and 20 minutes. Could be that, or could be some misguided aspirations toward David Lean-dom. In any case, while William Wellman's 1958 Lafayette Escadrille wasn't quite a classic, at least it came in at a brisk 93 minutes. And it allowed the hero to fall in love with a whore.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.