Flyboys Widescreen Edition

Product Description In 1914; "The Great War" - WWI - began in Europe. By 1917; the Allied powers of France; England; Italy and others were on the ropes against the German juggernaut. Some altruistic young Americans disagreed with the war. They volunteered to fight alongside their counterparts in France; some in the infantry; some in the Ambulance Corps. A handful of others had a different idea: they decided to learn how to fly. The first of them - a squadron of only 38 - became known as the Lafayette Escadrille. This is their story. Forced to abandon his family's ranch; Blaine Rawlings finds his future in a newsreel chronicling the adventures of young aviators in France. At a small train station in rural Nebraska; William Jensen promises to make his family proud. In New York; spoiled Briggs Lowry embarks on a trans-Atlantic passage. Meanwhile; in France; black expatriate boxer; Eugene Skinner; vows to repay his debt to his adopted racially tolerant country. Together; these American boys arrive at an aerodrome in France; eager to learn how to fly. What they didn't realize was that they were about to embark on a great; romantic adventure; becoming the world's first combat pilots. Amazon.com 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 t