Collegiate Times

In a Hollywood market that has been heavily saturated in recent years with World War II sagas, it is refreshing to see a film that focuses on the first Great War. It is even more impressive to see a war film that does not feel the need to be a sweeping epic ? one that limits its scope to a small and historically accurate storyline. Unfortunately, the achievement of ?Flyboys? ends there. Director Tony Bill takes a narrative with great potential and ruins it with a bland script, two-dimensional characters and a plot line that lacks any discernable organization or direction.

?Flyboys? is a film based on the true story of the Lafayette Escadrille ? a group of American pilots who volunteered to fight in France before America?s involvement in World War I. Merely a decade after the invention of the airplane, these brave soldiers became the first fighter pilots in American history.

The formulaic plot line is predictable and tedious, and the film?s length (140 min) exacerbates the problem. The film essentially adheres to the conventional story of a group of soldiers thrown together who get over their initial animosity for one another, and through the tribulations of war become brothers.

For a film that is based on actual historical figures, the lack of realism in the characters is astonishing. In the first 10 minutes, we are introduced to five American youths entering the war for all too familiar reasons: the rebel cowboy with no family and nothing to lose, the third generation soldier fighting to live up familial expectations, the upper-class idealist rebelling against his parents, the African-American searching for equality on the battlefield and the zealous man of faith who sings ?Onward Christian Soldier? as he shoots down German planes. To say these characters lack depth is an understatement. The majority of the film feels like an integration of stereotypes recycled from every war movie of the past 20 years ? only this time piloting biplanes.

This not only makes the characters uninteresting, a few of them become downright annoying. I distinctly recall feeling a swell of relief when a particularly obnoxious American pilot was set ablaze and forced to abandon his plane at 2,000 feet. This is undoubtedly not the kind of response the writers intended from the audience; however, the clich?d characters simply do not feel real and obtain no sympathy in their melodramatic deaths.

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