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Flyboys: A Review

I’ve been working an exceptional amount of hours lately and I haven’t had much time off, but this Saturday night I managed to get enough time to go out with my wife and see a movie.

So we had to choose between “The Black Dahlia” and “Flyboys”. I’m a big James Ellroy fan, and I loved the book, so that was probably going to be the one but then I caught Michael Medveds show on Friday and he had the Director of “Flyboys” Tony Bill on for an interview.

Michael Medved, whose movie reviews I usually agree with and is someone of whom I personally admire; spoke admirably about the movie which was a big point in its favor over “The Black Dahlia”. What’s more important is that this is a film where the central subject matter involves flying and the director Tony Bill is a pilot himself, so I was intrigued. Michael Medved was very enthusiastic about the film, and since he is a historian, his view on the film meant more than a simple nod towards “that’s entertainment”.

Tony Bill made a big point about playing up not just the films historical accuracy but that pilots and aviation enthusiasts would appreciate the attention to detail that was put into the film.

Now this means a lot to me, because as a pilot I can honestly say that in my opinion, only two movies in the whole of film history have ever managed to capture the thrill of flight. Most movies that have aircraft as a plot device or involve flying in any way are usually so laughably bad I can’t stand to watch them. Don’t even get me started talking about the last abomination in this category called “Pearl Harbor”. oh good god... Even Kate Beckinsale and a real live Zero Fighter couldn’t save that horrid movie from celluloid embarrassment. And the new ‘Flight of the Phoenix’? All I have to say is; “Motorcycle riding mongolian desert dwelling drug runners” and you know everything you need to know about how to make a really great movie suck like a lamprey eel.

So off we went my wife and I, on our first in six months “Saturday Night Date”. Off to see a World War One flying epic made by pilots and Michael Medved said he just loooooved it.

“What could go wrong?” I said to my wife.

Oh how I wish I had gone to see “The Black Dahlia” instead. Boy, did I hate this movie. I mean, not since “Aces: Iron Eagle III” have I hated a movie that involved flying so much. This is one completely and genuinely bad movie in almost every respect.

Accurate? Did I hear Tony Bill say that pilots will appreciate the accuracy?

Bah!

According to the makers of this film, the Imperial German Air Forces were made up entirely of Fokker Triplanes, all of which were painted bright red.

Not just one Red Triplane, but every single one.

Every.Single.Fighter.

Except one of course and that one belongs to “The Black Falcon”

bwhahahahahhaha. The mysterious “Black Falcon”, who strafes men mercilessly on the ground for no chivalrous reason at all. I know what you’re thinking; “Hey! Didn’t I see that on an episode of Johnny Quest”?

Oh yeah. And it gets worse from there.

Much,much worse...

The movie starts with the words “inspired by a true story”. If you ever see these words at the start of a movie, get up and leave. These are Hollywood’s “weasel words” to say to the audience “nothing like this even remotely happened in the history of mankind, but if we told you this was the case, you wouldn’t watch any of it because this is just total made up crap”.

Look, it’s either a true story, or its not. This movie doesn’t even say its “based on a true story” which is their way of saying that some of the characters have been changed but the basic facts and figures are pretty much the way it happened. “Inspired” means that the movie is so far from what actually happened that the people who really lived through it wouldn’t even recognize it as something they were involved in, even if the film used their real names.

There is nothing about this film that is inspired by anything. I’ve seen better graphics on a Sega Genesis and more realistic portrayals of life in “The Sims”.

Here’s the core of my complaints about movies like “Pearl Harbor” and now “Flyboys”. Back in the past, you had to forgive a great deal of material mistakes because they didn’t have CGI and matte paintings and airplane models can only go so far. If you wanted to have a squadron of Me-109's in your movie, you either had to get very bad models hanging on all too visible strings or you had to get a group of war surplus P-51 Mustangs painted up to look like ME-109’s. You as an audience member knew this and you forgave the filmmaker for his sins. You knew there were no MIG’s for Hollywood to use in the 1950’s, so when they used F-84’s in “The Hunters”, you were ok with it, you just let it go. You knew that the “Zero” was really just a modified T-6, and you knew the Corsairs in “Baa Baa Black Sheep” were doing one hell of a job just to keep from stalling out of the sky as they try tried to go as slow as the T-6/Zeros to make it look like combat, but you let it go anyway. What choice did you have?

But this is the “Age of CGI”. If you can make me believe that “dinosaurs are real” and the “Titanic is still afloat”, then you can sure as hell make a realistic looking aircraft in the sky. You can even make a historically accurate one, that is, if you choose to. Showing the World War I German Air force as made up of nothing but Red Fokker Triplanes; then all you have done is make the decision to treat a good portion of your audience with total contempt.

“Oh they’ll never know” they must’ve said this to each other when they reviewed the CGI for the final cut of the film.

Sorry boys, we do know and we don’t like what we see.

Listen, there are people I know who get upset if you use the wrong canteen on troops in Civil War movies. I know people who freak out at tedious details in Star Trek movies, but that’s nothing compared to what pilots do when they see movie scenes like this:

Oh look, that’s a Nieuport and he’s trying to turn inside a Fokker Triplane.

Sheeesh!

Allow me to explain to the non-flying public "a pilots revulsion" to this scene. A Fokker Triplane is the single most maneuverable aircraft in the history of warfare; it could virtually turn in the length of its own fuselage. And frankly, it couldn’t do much else BUT maneuver. The Nieuport? well it regularly sheared its own wings off in high Gee tight turn maneuvers; which is why the French gave them to us to fly. You didn’t dogfight the Fokker Triplane, you dived on it and you ran away as fast as you could. The Fokker Triplane in the hands of a skilled pilot wasn’t a fair fight. I don’t even want to point out that the Lafayette mostly flew SPAD’s anyway; for that would be the least of the films sins.

To my knowledge, there was only one “Red Triplane” and it belonged to a certain Baron with a colorful moniker. They were never deployed in squadron strength, and they were usually the ‘prized mount’ of only a few pilots. Werner Voss and Baron Von Ritchofen are two names of Fokker DRI pilots that pop into my head.

Since the CGI scenes are all ‘made up’ anyway, why not make the CGI into Fokker DVII’s or Albatross’ which were plentiful and were a much more even match for the Nieuport? Why not at least change the color of the aircraft now and then? It’s just not like the old days where you worked with whatever you had. This is CGI, you can make anything appear on screen. They could have made a squadron of pterodactyls if they wanted to. They should have, it would have been more entertaining. You could have asked people who said they went to see the movie "hey did you see the pterodactyls?" as a test to see if they managed to stay awake, and frankly, most people would have failed the test.

The errors in this film are not limited to simply the amateurish mistakes in the use of CGI aircraft. There are some real whoppers of “bad plot concepts” on display here as well. There is a scene where a pilot flies his biplane behind enemy lines and rescues his girlfriend and her three nieces and nephews - At night!

That’s right, an unlit biplane, a unlit grassy landing field, in a war zone, at night.

Really!

Landing at night on grass is tough, even with lights and instruments. Without either, its not really called a "landing" anymore; it’s a called a “crash”.

And he performs this feat not once, but twice! For just a second I honestly thought he was going to try to fly his french girlfriend and her three nieces and nephews out on one flight, but in a nod to the realities of “weight and balance” and the desperate need to pad the story out for 10 more minutes, the pilot has to come back for a second trip to get his girlfriend, whom is then promptly shot as payment for her sins. And where is she shot? The same place everyone is shot in the movies, in the upper shoulder of course. I guess that’s the body’s “catchers mitt” because everyone who is shot in Hollywood always gets hit up there.

And the fun doesn’t end there. Later in the film the pilot tries to rescue another downed pilot from his squadron who has crashed into “no mans land” and pinned under his aircraft. So what does he do? Sure enough, he decides to land his plane in "no mans land" and then run across “no mans land” in broad daylight to rescue the downed pilot. Its not like the lines are separated by miles and miles of empty land, in this film the French and the Germans are probably within about 50 yards of each other, yet this is where our downed pilot is crashed and the “daring young friend” decides its best to help by landing his aircraft right in the middle and then running over to rescue his downed comrade.

Let the French hang the expense of the loss of the aircraft. Hey, just put it on my tab, eh Frenchy! Forget the fact that landing in an aircraft with no brakes in the middle of a place called “no mans land” that is both full of land mines and is covered by machine guns is going to be both damned hard and dammed silly, what’s really important to the filmmakers is that the asinine plot gets extended for another 10 ridiculous minutes.

There are more clichés than you can shake your finger at(crap!, theres one now...). There are the makings of a good college drinking game in this film (Take one drink for every hackneyed war movie cliché you catch). The only thing missing from this film is one character that says; “ You can’t send a kid up in a crate like that!”

Well, maybe it will make it on the “directors cut” DVD. That is something to look forward to. I cant wait to see what didn't make the cut of this film.

The reason you see these bad choices on film is because the filmmaker decided to get sloppy. You have to understand this fact. This film, the final output of which you paid 10 bucks a shot to see, was a conscious decision; everything you see on film is a result of an actual decision being made. Keep this scene, cut that one, keep that take and lose that one. There are no accidents in movies, and there weren’t any in this film. What you see on the screen is exactly what they wanted you to see, or what they had to settle for inorder to tell you the story.

In the case of this film, the filmmakers just held you and I in contempt as an audience, no more, no less.

The makers of the film might as well have saved their CGI money and filmed the entire movie with DC-3‘s for all the “accuracy” this movie managed to provide for us, the "flying" audience. This was like making a movie about Gettysburg and with both sides using M-16’s and throwing hand grenades. The makers of the film simply didn’t care to make a good film that was slightly inaccurate, or to make a very accurate film that was good or a great film that was both.

They chose instead to make a bad film that was inaccurate. They chose to do this.

Yet, this films greatest crime isn’t the childish plot or the ham-handed historical inaccuracies or the technical incompetence; it’s that it is simply not entertaining to the audience. I’m in the key demographic for historical flying movies, Im a Pilot, Im a history freak and I could barely contain my boredom with this treacle. I should have been on this movie like a Chihuahua in Zsa-Zsa Gabors lap but I really hated this movie. Frankly, it bored me. My wife drifted off in the first 20 minutes. You can forget what type of plane the Germans are flying and whether or not thats what they did in the war, to her it was just dull.

For the record, aviation is rarely captured very well on film. Most screenwriters, directors, actors and most of the money people involved with a film only know about what the cockpit is like from what they see through the door while they sit in their seats in “first class”. But the makers of this film are pilots, real live pilots with thousands of hours in their log books and pilot ratings that go on forever; so there is simply no excuse for the kind of technical incompetence that ultimately serves as the core of the film. It’s not like the old days where you had to work with whatever ‘war surplus’ there was around the airport. Now you can make whatever aircraft you like appear on film in whatever angle you choose. To make these kinds of fundamental mistakes in film today is nothing but a total shame and there is simply no excuse for it.

Flying and the emotions that a pilot feels while flying have rarely been seen in film and you wont find any emotions in this film at all, except tedium and boredom. After watching this film you know no more about what it feels like to be a World War One pilot than you know about what its like to be a dog.

If you want to see a great movie that shows what a pilot actually feels like inside while flying, then watch “The Great Waldo Pepper”. If you want to see a great yet historically inaccurate “B” movie about World War I flying, watch “ The Blue Max” instead of this crap. Oh, it’s a crock as well, but its at least entertaining. You just can’t go wrong with James Mason and Ursula Andress. Watch 1948’s ‘Fighter Squadron’ if you want to see a really god awful bad flying war movie, worse even than “Flyboys”. Sure I watched it more than once, but hey, its got P-47’s in it (in living color!) so I looked the other way when all the “acting” was going on. It’s the same thing I did when watching ‘Strategic Air Command’. People tell me that June Allyson is in it, but I never noticed her. All I saw were the B-36’s and you don’t see those every day. An actress is an actress but after all a B-36 is a B-36!(A mans got to have priorities!)

A great flying movie makes you want to go get your pilots license the next day. All this movie makes you want to do is to ‘tar and feather’ the projectionist.

For the record, most movies about war are really awful movies. I’m not sure why this is, but its true. I think its fair to say that I’ve watched just about every war movie ever made silent and talking, from ‘black and white’ to color, and out of all of them I can’t name more than five that were any good and even less than that I consider to be ‘great’. Most of them are just awful, some are even worse than this one. My own theory about why nearly every “war movie” is bad, despite the fact that as a rich source of human emotions and stories, is that the people who have lived through wars rarely want to relive the experience by contributing screenplays or acting in them and those that haven’t lived through it, cant begin to capture the horrors accurately enough to make it true and honest. This is why most ‘war movies’ are 80% about love stories and 20% about shooting people as the writers and directors all understand what it is to love a woman and haven’t a clue what its like to be shot at or live through an artillery barrage, so they “go with what they know”.

What annoys me most about this film is the way it fails to deliver the most important thing besides entertainment. It utterly fails to educate the audience about the Lafayette Escadrille. In this film, the members of the squadron are made up of the usual group of American scoundrels and mountebanks right out of central casting. Sure, there were some that were scoundrels and mountebanks, but there were also far more who were the kind of ‘east coast snots’ I tend to make fun of. These are men who volunteered to come over to France long before we came into the war, to the French Foreign Legion as infantrymen, as ambulance drivers and then as pilots for the Lafayette Escadrille. They were men; real men and they deserve to be remembered for what they did and not just as the caricatures that Hollywood has made them out to be. They deserve more for their sacrifices than to have their memory denigrated by a poorly executed cartoon of a movie.

Eugene Bullard certainly deserves better.

People today more than ever need to be inspired by the people of the past who gave their all for the cause of freedom, not bored out of their mind by a poorly made, cliché laden movie that is destined only to lose money for its investors and to sit next to “Ernest Goes to Jail” at the bottom of the discount DVD bin at Wal-Mart.

Posted @ September 23, 2006 11:59 PM | Movie Reviews

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